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Funny Questions #3
- THREE STRIKES DOES NOT MEAN YOU'RE OUT! FUNNY QUESTIONS RETURN FOR ROUND THREE! -
The rules of this contest are simple

Write a funny question as an answer to this post. Put the title of that question following a #.

You may pretty much use any method you want to make your question funny.

The winner will be decided based on who has the most up votes.

Downvotes are Not Counted When determing the winner, so save your daily votes. (you only get 40)

Although I highly doubt there are any five-year-olds on this site, we must use the same rule from the previous image contests, and keep the entries "Politically Correct" .

This is now the third time that this event has run. Although there is nothing stopping you from stealing ideas from previous entrees, You may NOT directly copy entries from the previous events and post them here. Mostly/Entirely original content is recommended.

The main point is to create a question that other users will find funny.

The winner will be chosen and his/her/its entry will be accepted. The link to that entry will be placed in the space below, along with the entries that almost won.

The winner will be chosen on October 27th. Other entries are welcome after that, but the winners entree will stay accepted (even if new entries gain more upvotes).

YOUR QUESTION SHOULD NOT BE POSTED ON THE MAIN SITE OR IN ANY PLACE OTHER THAN THIS POST UNLESS YOUR QUESTION IS A REAL, SERIOUS QUESTION.

- You may enter no more than twice.
However, only one entree can obtain first place. (Obviously)

WINNER AS OF 10-27-2015
There was a two way tie for first place.
First place entries from David♦ and cegaton.
As absurd as it is, there was also a two way tie for second, and another two way tie for third!

Previous runs of the event:
Funny Questions 1
Funny Questions 2

Do questions about the VSE count as funny?

I just Dowloaded blender, but not working HELP plz!
PS I'm using the latest version of Monkey Linux.
PPS how do I format my question correctly?
PPPS how do I make those cool videos like @David and @gandalf3 have in their answers?

installation dowload monkey i-dowloaded-the-blender-exe-version-2.21.--but-it-is-not-installing-corectly-on-my-computer.--i-do-not-know-much-about-blender-or-exe-files thanks

+1 for the  tag

Only sightly inspired from the events of a certain blend hosting service.

PS anybody notice the latest release date for Monkey Linux?

+1 for "Dowloaded" @GiantCowFIlms

Why do my quads have only four vertices?
This is very Irritating guys, not funny like the rest of the questions on your blue section, I don't want to work with n-gons! I've searched all over the internet but found nothing. I'm not a noob! I've been using Aztek-3d and StudioMinus for many years and never had any issues with multi-vertex quads and tris or making monogons with multiple edges. Even when I import my old models from Sketchy plus they don't work in blender no more. Why does blender insist on limiting triangles to three vertices and quads to only four? I thought this was free software, so I'd be free to have the geometry I want with no restrictions. In Cinema5D I've always created planes, spheres and rhinos with just one or two vertices and perfect UVs every time with no fuss. Am I missing something?

I do not seem to have the problem you are describing. One quad with 32 vertices. Maybe you should report this bug to autodesk.

NO! that's not it: I need my squares to be rounded but remain straight! Can't blender deal with that like all of the other programs? This is so frustrating!!!!!!!!!

Easily! I round the square, then rotate it to show that it is still straight. PS blender can do everything.

i have problem...
i download blender from there website and isnatlled then i maked a new file and tried to add monkey and it worked until here but then i click modifier and error occured a friend tried to click also modifier but no problem please help me and fix blender to not give me error when i click modifier i dont want to lose my work and not sure if i can save with error exists i will leave blender open until working version of blender give me workaround or fix modifier click error that wood be helpful thanks!!!!1111eleven
problem help blender

instal the plugin and click on the button on the right of the screen... no, not that one!... the other! Yes, that one. the settings won't effect the result but it will render just fine if you render on wednesdays or fridays.

How to make blender darken, cause its all whited out and I can't do anything with it after I moved the bones on my character
OK, so I'm making a minecraft animation, and I have a rig with every block!
And so I create a world with it (It took me about a month) but I finally had copied enough blocks to create a world. Its not infinite, unfortunately, but It goes as far as you can see in every direction. Trees, mountains, caves, ect.
But now I imported a player, and when I tried to move his hand, the the whole tab whited out, and now I can't do anything! I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that makes it do that when you try and move the bones on a character, but I don't know what one it might be. Is it in the settings? What buttons should I push?
UPDATE Never mind guys I came back from lunch and it wasn't whited out anymore! Thanks for helping!
Another Update Ignore that first update! I tried to move the character again and it did the same thing!
Help!

The sad thing is this is quite close to some real questions we get.

Blender is sooooooo very slooooow!
so i've been trying for hours to render my sci-fi feature length animation in 4k using cycles (it's like prequel to interstellar, but with more explosions and way cooler effects). i'm rendering to AVI format, but my computer is like running way too slow. It's annoying! all of my games and skype are getting bugged down while blender renders! i can't even watch netflix like this! i don't understand why my computer is running so slow because it has always been very powerful,it has a 4TB hard drive and the latest update to the operating system. Is there a plugin to make it go faster?

if you plug in your computer, chances are it will work much better.

Bummer! I thought Macs were exempt from such mundane and insignificant requirements!!!

Only if you get a mac with a built in cold fusion generator.....

No, macs have much bigger problems too though, like when you push the power button they turn on.

I keep it off so that I don't have to hear the chime sound every time it turns on... or could that chime be the problem I'm having with the VSE then?

No joke, you took my idea. This is nearly exactly what I was going to do. "Renders too slow, then go on to explain how slow all my games and stuff are running." Crazy how alike we think.

bug in my python!
Please help! A bug in my python causes a lot of trouble, I use Blender to fix this problem. I can't make it run. This reptile doesn't feel ok at all, it swallowed a spider. Does someone know how I can use blender to fix this.  Maybe if I run my blender, the noise makes the bug come out my python, and so my reptile feels ok.

Seriously people, Why won't you answer my question!!?!?!?!?
This is a simple question people, it shouldn't be too hard for any of you to figure out. blackhole could solve this it is so simple. your probably thinking, "if it is so simple, why cant you figure it out?" Because Im an Uber noob!!! My question is so simple I'm not going to bother telling you what it is!!!!! I want an answer and I want it now! and I'm not saying please!! But just because I'm so nice, I'll give you another question. I just watched two videos of someone rendering a cube in cycles, and somsone rendering a cube in Blender internal. Most useless video EVER!!! Yes or No? On a scale of 1-10 do you prefer cycles or blender internal? If I don't get any answers on this, I'm going to just use both Bi and cycles! I'm making a full length movie in the game engine and I need to know whether or not I should use cycles or blender internal! I would think that everything you do inside of blender is blender internal! isn't that the dumbest name ever heard of for a render engine??? and cycles- what is it cycling through? Headaches caused by trying to decipher the reason for the name? Bonus question! Just for you because you guys are so good at answering questions already! I wanted to make a breathtaking nuclear explosion on a hillside with the camera swooping up over a  mountain with a view of the sunset behind. how can I make this? I just download blender and any tips on how I can un-zip the folder would help immensely.
Ps. If you choose blender internal, how can I switch to it from cycles?
Ps. 2.0 I need my full length sci-fy movie of aliens causing the nuclear apocalypse done in 5 days. My assignment is due by then so I need an answer FAST
thanks!

This guy manages to steal 2.7k rep from the system but cannot unzip a folder?

There are layers who graduate with a doctorate from law school, but they don't know how to change a light bulb.

HELP! my monkeys eyes keep falling out! how can i keep the eyes int eh monkey head?
i have a BIG problem when i make animaton of cloth sim for monkey head the eyes always fal out and it looks gross so plz HELp cuz i dont know what is wrong wiht it they just fall out and i didnt tell thme too

get the "fix monkey and make everything better." addon. it is great for this type of situation.


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Is there any rule against fake bounties?
Are there any official rules against putting fake bounties at the end of your posts?
The links work in both of them, but you can not select the text.
This one looks quite convincing on the main site.

This one looks very convincing everywhere.

Would things such as this simply be considered spam?

Tags go above the bounty, so this is easy to detect. Another tell-tale hint is that it would not be featured as a question with a bounty.

No. This should not be allowed
The big issue is this "joke" is extra noise in your post (like a greeting/signature). SE doesn't permit such things. As @NoviceInDisguise observed,  it will be edited out quickly, and you will only succeed in annoying a user who has to go to all the trouble.
Furthermore, you may have to deal with and upset user expecting a bounty. Probably best just to avoid it.

The ease with which you can simulate a bounty moderately well is amazing, however it is easy to detect if it is real or not. (Tags go above the bounty, so this is easy to detect. Another tell-tale hint is that it would not be featured as a question with a bounty, etc)
Personally I think they will get edited out very quickly as our community is great at reviewing questions.
However repeatedly posting posts like this could result in serious actions on the part of our moderators, and could result in your suspension from the site.

This answer has an open bounty worth  reputation from GiantCowFilms ending in 5 days.
This answer should be accepted.

your link to giant cow's profile also goes to the bounty page, and the +2,700 is not at the same line height as the other text.

I know, I literally typed this using only one image in about 20 seconds.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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What are the policies to deal with plagiarism?
In this answer https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/39779/1853 the poster copied and pasted from blender guru's website. No attribution is given or even a link as if he/she had written the text. What is the policy for this case?

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/160071/what-to-do-when-plagiarism-is-discovered

(This link pretty much says it all.) *I did not see your comment when I wrote this*
What to do when plagiarism is discovered
If it is something small, say part of a description of some node copied from the manual, then just edit the post and add in the proper attribution and blockquotes.
However it is is an entire post, like the linked example, or the user has a history of this type of thing then just flag it.
When you flag for a moderator's attention please use a custom flag message something like:

This post looks like plagiarism, < url to original source >

When you add the original url so the mods can check and see that this was in fact plagiarism, it will exponentially boost your chances of getting a helpful flag.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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What does a "Leave Open" vote do?
When I vote on a question to "leave open", how does that affect the closure of the question?  Does a "leave open" vote negate a "close" vote, or does it simply do nothing, or does it do something else?

Casting a "Leave Open" vote in the close review queue, counts towards getting the question out of the queue and kept open.
If any question in the close review queue (CRQ) gets three "leave open" votes it gets removed from the queue (thus greatly reducing the chance that it will be closed).
It does not negate the close votes, but if the review item is completed with a Leave Open result, the close votes will begin aging away immediately.
What exactly happens with the button "Leave Open" (previously "Do Not Close")?


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Improve your old answers party!
I recently got an up vote on a rather old answer of mine. I took a moment to read it since I'd forgotten what it said, and promptly discovered it made nearly no sense (the animated gifs made it usable, but it wasn't great). Naturally I promptly repaired it, but this made my realize how unpolished and poor some of my old answers were.
I thought now, as many users are getting onto their first year and our site is graduating, it would be a good time to look back and clean up some old content and see just how much we have learnt.
Lets go back and clean up, clarify and correct old answers that we wrote. Of course you should correct any answer that isn't up to scratch, but lets specifically go out of our way to fix our own content.
Please post your changes here, one answer per person (use edits), so we can see how much is being done, and help motivate ourselves, since seeing other people's contributions is very inspiring, as well as getting some recognition.

Great idea! I'm sure I have loads of crap answers lying around..

Nice. We should probably extend the scope of this to include answers that were left in comments instead of as answers.

@Mentalist Sure, post those results too... I'm still eagerly awaiting some answers :D

Good idea!  I'll start right away.  I am sure I have some pretty bad stuff left over from when I first started.

Update answers that reflect features in newer versions of blender. Some answers deal with workarounds for features missing or bugged on old blender versions. If you know some new feature that can be used or a workflow that has changed please note it.

Here's what I've done so far:

Is there a way to capture the viewport in Blender the same way as it is on 3DS Max?
Weight paint front and back faces at the same time
Repeat a generated texture in Cycles?
Materials and Exporting to different formats
Unselectable edge? Help!

wiki to manual links, is a HUGE job (I have about 90 answers to change), and nearly every wiki link needs to be manually changed. :(
Also moving my last pastall hosted files.
Another annoyance. All cgcookie links are bad. (switch to youtube if available.)
Why does the material show 'unexpected' transparency effects?
Remove vertex while using knife tool?
My parent answer
Which object should be selected when selected to active is check for texture baking?
Make Camera System Look at Empty
Object Info Node
Problem: material has stretched on side of shape

I started on writing a python script to identify which wiki urls should go to which manual urls (with the idea of generating a list of redirects for the blender wiki servers), but not being a super skilled python expert I have yet to get it to work completely. Perhaps someone with more python experience might like to help?

Here's what I've updated so far:

Iridescence In Cycles?
Zoom in and out without a mouse wheel
Resource for Blender addons?
How do I take a flat model and wrap around an axis like a wheel?
How do I set a background image while I am editing?

I finally started to get to work on updating some of mine.
The big one is this
How to distribute objects in a circular pattern on a surface (Radial Array, Polar Array)
I updated a few others, but they weren't really significant changes. Removing a dead CGC link, and some small clarifications. In all, I've probably edited around 5-6 so far.


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Some users appends .blend files with wrong "dowload" linked image

Is there a way to correct this minor typo?
eg:
Can't get the right camera settings that match the scene

I'm not sure I follow, can you link the question?

I just linked it in the text above

Oh, I completely missed the apparent typo pointed to by the huge arrow and label.

I can't believe we could have possibly missed that for so long, especially @david, Mr. anti-spam!

Apparently, in the same mental state that got the "n" left out, I also managed to lose the .psd file. Hopefully I will have a new one soon.

... OO did you really use a PSD??? :D

o.O How did we all miss this for so long? (@GiantCowFilms are you sure no one had unauthorized access to the repo or something? :P)

@gandalf3 I'm pretty confident the mistake was always there. The main reason that if someone had changed it I wouldn't have had such a hard time making everything line up when I fixed it (I'm still not happy with how it looks now :/).

More interesting, the previous (controversial due to supposed advertising) version of the image was missing the "n".

That is hilarious. so all along, the MOD-Team was having a fit about the "advertising" and "spam" when we all missed a typo that should have been obvious! lol!

Ooops! That was a bad typo
It is now fixed, and all the old images updated!

There we go!

You'll never be able to forget :-) http://i.stack.imgur.com/mh7TN.png

With or without typo... Thanks @GiantCowFilms for creating the http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/ it has certainly made this site a lot more useful!

@cegaton You are welcome, it was much fun, thanks for the kind words!

I still think "dowload" should be a hidden bonus feature. Like, if you type it into the URL you get some "Easter egg" or something. ...Shoot, the URLs use a different schema, no way to implement that.

@Mentalist If you want Easter eggs, take a look at the bottom of my profile.

This service is generously hosted/provided to the community by GiantCowFilms, send all blame his way ;). You can give him a nudge in our main chatroom to update the image.


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Expired links for images
What to do with things like this? With broken links on the images, the answer is incomplete...

related: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/577/how-to-deal-with-dead-links

Related: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/127450/238438. There isn't much that can be done. Try leaving a comment notifying the OP of the issue, and suggest that they use the built in image upload function to avoid this happening in the future

I wonder if it would be possible to try and recreate the images.... It might take some guesswork, but it is still possible.

I can only think of two ways to prevent things like this from happening: making sure that an image doesn't disappear by automated backups, and making sure that you allways type in your answer what you can see on the image, so the answer isn't worthless without the images. (type "uncheck the combined render pass" instead of "change the settings to the settings in this image")


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Can I give my reputation to other users?
Does Blenderstack (and other stacks) allow to give some amount of my reputation (not limited to 15 points, but unlimited like in bounties) to other people who answer my question to thank them?
Example: @poor created an add-on, which will be super useful for me (How to disable/enable multiple shapekeys visibility?) and I want to thank him by giving some of my reputation. Is it possible?

I feel honored :) Thanks Gonzou!

Great to hear that sir :). The add-on you wrote for me works fantastic BTW.

Outside of bounties, no. A bounty is what you are looking for.
In fact "thanking him by giving some of my reputation" is one of the reasons for offering a bounty.

Reward existing answer
One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.

After you offer a bounty, there is a time block (24 hours) that you have to wait till you can grant it, but after that you can choose any answer on the question.
(There is another bonus, that the added exposure the bounty gives to the question may very well turn in to more UVs for the answer you want to reward.)
But no just giving rep is not allowed, for good reasons. We all want the site to stay fair.
(PS bounties are not unlimited: 500 is the max.)


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Is it appropriate to ask about project maintenance and architecture?
Executive Sumary
I'd like to find resources for learning how to maintain a small but non-trivial animation project, such as two or three minute animated film.  Would it be appropriate to open up a question on this?  Or would it be possible to add a "Project Architecture and Maintenance" section to the resources community wiki?  I'm asking on Meta because I realize this isn't a technical question about Blender, so I'm unsure of its appropriateness.
TL;DR
Once upon a time I began learning c++. For a popular language like this, the online resources for learning syntax, best practices, and basic design patterns are exhaustive.  However, I found it quite difficult to move from writing individual "toy" programs to large-scale, useful applications.  Most of what I've learned about the latter--which I eventually found out is called "software architecture"--I picked up from using, reading, and sometimes contributing to open source projects on GitHub.
Now I've been using Blender for a little while, and see myself running into a similar issue.  The online resources and user community for Blender are incredible.  But tutorials tend to be "single-serving" by their nature, focusing on a single object/scene/shot/technique.  What I'd like to understand is how to maintain a project in a way that supports modularity, and is scalable to a still small, but nontrivial project (say a short animated film of a few minutes, but involving multiple scenes and characters).  Are there resources (dedicated tutorials, or perhaps Blender projects on GitHub or elsewhere) where one could learn best practices for maintaining nontrivial projects?

In general we've avoided these sorts of questions, due to their broad scope and general nature (hard to provide a single definitive answer which applies to all projects). However, having a comprehensive reference for things like tried & tested organization techniques and common best-practices etc. would no doubt be extremely useful. Perhaps creating a canonical community wiki post is in order (we did something similar for GPU troubleshooting)

Something like that would be incredibly helpful, especially as asset managers/source control/integration with other apps evolve.  I'm happy to wait and gauge support, or I can go ahead and ask and just see how it is received.


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Contest for an Image for our blender nation article
Bart, who runs blendernation.com, has agreed to run an article when our site graduates. All articles have a featured image; we need one.
So this is a call for artwork. The size for featured image on an article is 728px wide by 336px tall.
There is no set theme (as I have no idea what should go there.) :)
Bonus points for any image that portrays blender stack exchange in some way.
Go nuts and have fun, make anything awesome.
It could be of a scene from another world, or a black hole (@gandalf3). It could be an epic mech standing over a burning stack of blenders (@x-27). It could be a massive pile of the most expensive watches (@NᴏᴠɪᴄᴇIɴDɪsɢᴜɪsᴇ). Or even a radish, large cow, or a bottle of milk. (@ARadish, @GiantCowFilms @zeffii) Etc.

Yes, some rules... (I'm not going to copy all of the guru's rules)

Keep the image the same size or aspect resolution as the featured image (728px by 336px).
Vote for the image(s) you would like to see as the header image.
This is open for submissions until November 22, 2015

Any of the moderators of BSE (me) at their direction may anytime alter this post and contest; remove and or add images and submissions; declare a winner of the grand prize (nothing); alter the final image; or do just about anything else they want. Including but not limited to whacking people with a large ban hammer. :)

That fine print..

"Go nuts and have fun" - Sure, but please don't make this a chat in-joke, remember who this is for (hint: people who don't get chat in-jokes).

Does this mean that we will get new graphics and I will lose all of my privileges shortly after the 22nd?

@X-27 http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/25100567#25100567

How did you happen to pick the 22nd? Wouldn't the 27th have been better?

Maybe something with a bold big "stackexchage" text would be funny, in a way... :) mine is not a typo, of course...

I suggest we don't allow voting until a specific deadline, otherwise the earlier entries will have a huge advantage simply for being around longer.

It would be nice to know what our logo will be so we could include that in the artwork.

@PGmath I would too.

November 22 in which time zone?

@Mentalist Alaska time which is UTC -10, or just look here.

@David Just an idea to generate content: Can we also have a full article including an interview with all the moderators (if they like) and some of the best questions/answers in order to get a first impression of the site?

Great idea! I was thinking some of the question and answers, but a quick interview with the mods, is great!

I thought about how the ? sign resambles to an hook. Next step was to draw a reversed hook that help another to get out of the mud. Then the mud became a sea to match Blender logo's color palette.
It looked not so bad till I realized that "the thing" in the middle (believe me or not but it's just a man with a fishing rod...damn waves) catches too much attention. Shame on me...

I'll post here another experiment with more or less the same intention:

I thought about a kind of "collaborative art" where everyone can contribute by giving one material to an object (maybe that remember a question/answer that has a meaning for him) to give an sense of community.
Do you think it would come up good? Maybe with the site's logo in the middle coverd by ??

I love this idea! How would you go about implementing it, though?

Probably by providing a public template, collect the blendfiles and append the materials manually (they will require a proper arrangement in the scene).

Well, I'm down for it, if you decide to do it.

I'll withdraw this idea @IncessantLee as it didn't get the wide acclaim required for this kind of projects. Maybe it'll get luckier in the 1st year anniversary competition :)

@Carlo Had a few undelete votes so I restored it. I think these are pretty good and you should keep them. Let me know if you want it removed again.

Thanks @iKlsR for your kindness, but I'm wondering if leaving it open doesn't mess up the votecount, as there are "two in one". Apart from this, it's fine for me to keep them

@Carlo Thanks for your effort. I really like your idea of the second one, but I think it's too grey for a header image, which should attract attention. Just an idea: what about coloring the question marks like http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/17934/3710 for a more friendy feel and introduce a bit fog and more zdepth? If you like the ideas just let me know whether I can help :)

I agree with you @poor, I dreamt of it as colorful, rich and glittered piece too. Though, I also believe that this idea looses too much (if not all) of its strenght if it is not run as community project, so I'm not personally inclined to develop it further on my own. Anyway thanks for your kind offer and suggestions!

Alright, here is the one gandalf3, TARDIS Maker, cegeaton and I worked on:

Few final things being touched up still

Information
For those of you who don't watch movies this is closely based of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The idea is centered around what our site is, an organized collaborative collection of useful blender information. A warehouse of blender info.
We took some liberties with the original image, in added question tags with actual question ID's on them, as well as populating the scene with workers (Empty is not an adjective for this site), and making it cleaner and more inviting. We also added little post boxes, which are either Questions, Answers or Accepted Answers, as denoted by the letter and or color.
The idea for this image is to be a metaphor for our site everything is carefully thought through. It is infinite in potential, and contains a massive amount of carefully maintained information.
The monkeys standing on each other shoulders are a metaphor for editing, since they are building on the work of others.
Notes
I wanted to put some subtle things in:

There are three monkeys with mod hats. Guess which one is which :D

One of them happens to be standing near a giant crate of reputation
Another one just happens to be tagging something
The third one is (and has been) pushing a cart representing our site

There is an equal number of accepted answer boxes (green) as there are orange question boxes. Afterall, it would be great if every question had an accepted answer :)

This image will be updated
We are not done with it. We will be adding more monkeys and textures; we will be adjusting the lighting and materials. We won't change the overall theme, so your vote is safe. Please comment for anything you think needs to be addressed

We are still working on this, as allowed. Why the downvote?

Nice use of the Stencil font! (A-Team font) I can't seem to find my mech in that render. Is it really small?

Ha, love it. I'm sure our avid users will as well.

Love it!  Are you going to continue the piles of crates on the sides to go to the horizon?  They look kind of funny stopping like they do now.

@PGmath Yes on ths sides, I'm not sure what to do with the horizon, we already have several thousand creates in the image, so its become a bit hard to manage.

@GiantCowFilms Are you using particle instancing for the crates?

Fortunate

View the uncompressed full-res original here.
Because Blender Stack Exchange is a place where you can get high quality answers to help you take your Blender skills to the next level.
It reads:
You will soon conquer your fear of UV mapping.

Lucky Numbers:  2,  7,  6

Why did I pick UV mapping? Just because I think it's something that intimidates a lot of new users. I remember avoiding it like the plague for a while before I felt comfortable with it.
Thanks for any and all support.

While I get your point, we shouldn't advertise that you get your questions answered out of luck. BSE is a database, not a lottery.

@DalekMaker It's not that you get your questions answered out of luck. It's that people are lucky to discover BSE, and lucky to have it as a resource. While it is a database, it is also more than just a stockpile of questions and answers. I consider it a community of users who are enthusiastic about sharing knowledge. You can find more than just facts here - you can gain Blender wisdom. :-)

I love this, so simple and relatable (even if UV mapping isn't your plague). Plus everyone loves a fortune cookie.

With the arrival of our new theme, I thought it would be a good idea to suggest something different from a render image: a screenshot of our site (We will get another one when the design is actually pushed).

Boring it may be, This is still a safe bet, and shows what our site looks like (literally) to the outside. It also shows off the new theme, which is about the only thing to change during the graduation, other than an extreme loss of privileges for most of us D:

A unarmed and almost totally harmless Forklift Mech. For moving pallets and crates full of questions and answers.

By the way, you should upvote GiantCowFilms' entry. A different colored version of this awesome mech is in there if you look really carefully. The scale is horribly off - the mech should be way bigger in his entry, but it is there, so it should get votes.
EDIT:
GiantCowFilms must have changed his entry, as this mech is now much smaller, is painted a dark color, and it is now in a shadow. You will have a Very hard time finding it.


text:
What kinds of questions should be migrated to video.stackexchange?
For example, this question was flagged as a possible candidate for migration.
Are general questions about tracking and the filming aspects of tracking on-topic here, even when not necessarily specific to blender?

Would be good to get someone from there to have a say in this as well.

@iKlsR I will see if I can get a mod from their site to drop by.

In the past we've allowed general CG questions as long as they are not overly broad and/or deal with aspects specific to another program.
Some related metas:

General 3D Graphics
Should we allow general workflow questions that don't directly relate to blender?
Should questions that don't directly relate to blender, but are about general artistic topics like composition be on or off topic?

In conclusion, I don't see any reason to treat tracking questions differently. If it's not not about blender, it's not necessarily not on topic.

I feel the same way, else most questions regarding video, video editing or compositing could also be condisered off topic. My feeling is that if the question is about something that could be accomplished in blender could stay on topic...

This particular question is a bit vague, but still on topic in my opinion

I'm one of the mods on Video Production.  Video Production already has a level of 3d graphics questions that get handled over there when non-blender specific.  We'd shy away from something like making assets for a game, but, my personal feeling at least, is that anything that has to do with the production of a movie, film, tv show, stream, youtube clip, whatever, is on topic for Video Production.  That can include anything from financing a production to producing effects shots to animation and modeling.
That said, I'm glad to see you guys handling some fringe stuff for general graphics since we do have a more limited set of people who are knowledgeable about 3d graphics on Video Production (I'm one of them), but just about anything you guys don't want can likely be funneled either our way, or game design's way if it is on the modeling for games side of things.  Of course, the standard "don't migrate crap" and "check if it'd be a dupe" stipulations still apply.
My thoughts would be handle whatever you think you can/want to here, since you have a larger base of 3d graphics experts, but anything that doesn't fit that is film and video related, send it our way and we have some generalists that may be able to help.

In general we allow anything that has to do with video post-production (e.g. CG, Animation, especially in After Effects). The question about motion tracking would be very well on-topic for us. We actually have quite a few questions already about motion tracking and motion compensation.
We also allow questions about 3D, though if they go deep into 3D modeling, rendering etc. they wouldn't quite fit our scope. If its a general beginner 3D question it would be ok to merge. Though if you are ok with these types of questions aswell it might be better to keep them here as your users would have much more know-how in that area. We just accept them because so far there wasn't a better fit for these type of questions and they fit the area of video production in a way.
I think as a rule of thumb, if it can be done in or is about After Effects, Nuke etc. its ok to merge.

Hard to decide in general, but in this case the question is:

Has somebody tips about how to shoot a good video for motion tracking?

Tracking algorithms/detecting feature points are mostly identical in all motion tracking environments nowadays, so the question is  more about planning a shot and that's not really Blender related (IMO). I'm sure this question could be answered here. But even if, it seems too broad for blender.se at the moment and sounds more like a 'drive by question' without any further details.
Since video.se allows broader questions like:

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/8198/what-software-do-movies-use-for-fx
https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14973/which-would-be-the-best-vfx-software-for-an-absolute-beginner (migrated from blender.se)
https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/2500/about-film-making-techniques

It probably makes sense for the OP (in this case) to migrate. Most important is that the user gets a solid answer, right? Why not wait a few days so our users have the chance to comment and answer something blender related and migrate it afterwards?


text:
Always mention that something is an add-on when referencing add-on features
I recently had an experience trying to answer a user's question that was very confusing because that user neglected to mention that the feature he was referring to is only available after enabling a certain add-on.
Maybe this isn't such a big deal that it deserves a post, but then again I think it's common sense and we should somehow get the message out to users that just because they may think everyone knows about their add-ons doesn't necessarily mean it is so.
Having the courtesy to type "add-on" somewhere in the question isn't an unreasonable request.
Thoughts and ideas, anyone?

We have an [tag:add-on] tag, IMO any question using an addon should use this tag.  But AFAIK there really isn't any way to force people to use it.

@PGmath I would not encourage tag usage like that. The tags should be describing what the question is about. You should defanitly put in your question that such and such is done by addon X, but to tag every question that has a problem where the user has used an addon is too broad.

@David What I mean is that, iff the addon is a necessary element of the problem (which I think is what mentalist means) it should be tagged addon.

Yes, and yes. If knowledge of the add-on is required to answer the question, users should use the add-on tag. However, tagging all questions that mention add-ons would be overkill and not helpful. As for a place where such community guidelines can be posted, I don't know that SE currently offers such an area(?) I'm imagining something like reddit's sidebar and I can't think of an equivalent on Stack Exchange.


text:
What does the number next to the "review" button signify?
Sometimes there is a number in an orange box to the left of the "review" button at the top of the page.  Clicking on the number brings me to the review queue, just like clicking the review button itself.  But what does this number (or lack thereof) mean?
Intuitively, I would think this would be the number of posts awaiting review.  But this number and the number of posts in the review queue are rarely equal.  Furthermore, sometimes there is no number there and there are posts in the queue or vice-versa.

Not much... It is supposed to tell you how many total reviews are waiting in the queue. However do to caching it sometimes reflects how many reviews are left to do, most of the time it is just an orange number.
What does the number next to the review link in the top bar actually mean?
Also this is the same issue that gandalf was talking about here:
Suggested edit notification wrong

Why on earth do they even have it if it is inaccurate?  You'd think they'd have fixed or removed it by now.

No idea... (and it has been this way for a while)

The official explanation: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/233535/238438


text:
specific add-on tags
Recently a tag was created for animation-nodes, so I decided to also create the wiki tag for sverchok. These are both big non-trivial add-ons and totally deserve a tag. Before I start tagging the other Questions about Sverchok, and before I put more effort into the tag wiki I'd like to know if this is acceptable practice.

I have said this before about other new tags, There should be no set right or wrong answer to whether or not "this" tag is ok. The question usage should drive the demand for a new tag.
That said, I'm not sure we need a sverchok tag now, seeing as there so few questions. It looks to me (after a quick search) like there are 4 questions that could use the sverchok tag.
However tag the sverchok questions, lets see how much use the sverchok tag gets, if it is popular by all means then it should be a tag.
I'm also leaning towards its own tag because it is something quite distinct; no other tag will work.

I have been surprised at new tag usage in the past,for what I thought would be a odd tag. So there is no way to know for sure until we give a new tag time in the open.

PS thanks for bringing this to meta.

I hold contradicting views about whether or not to encourage the specific tags. If it gathers traction I might warm to it.

@zeffii what is your position? Because at this point I think it is an ok thing to do. We can go to the chat.

i think if a question arises due to unclear/lacking documentation, the question should be directed at the issue-tracker of the specific add-on. The best thing for each add-on is to have satisfactory docs, not sporadic info on BSE. It's almost like a 'soft-bug', fix it once in the add-on repo and the question doesn't need to exist anymore.

You have a very good point. Yet what to tag all the real questions that can arise (even with documentation and video tutorials)? Because good docs will never stop all the questions.

On the other hand... asking for a tutorial / run throughs also enters this grey area.. where does Blender start and 'add-on' X begin ? :) In some cases the more elaborate add-ons can really be viewed as distinct pieces of software that just happen to run inside Blender.

Documentation can rarely be comprehensive to the extent that all potential questions are negated. But sometimes clearly the docs should be improved as a result of dealing with these questions (this also with respect to Blender itself... and I think it's not something we do generally...fix the docs when weakness is encountered)

Just a small typo, you used weather rather than whether in your second sentence. (I don't have full edit privileges)

@angussidney thank you.  PS you can always edit a post, just it will be reviewed first.

@David the edit button is disabled entirely on meta for sub-2k users. Otherwise I would have edited it myself.

@David http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/78223/per-site-metas-dont-have-ability-of-suggested-edits/78319#78319

@angussidney I learn something new about SE every day. thanks.


text:
What is the process for creating gifs for questions and answers?
We now have over 1600 posts with gifs in them, gifs are very popular and useful; however it seems that they can be hard to create.
I have read placing .gifs in text and How to post gifs on this site?, yet I still have not found a complete write up for how to create and add gifs.

Yet another idea. This tool is now here.

@pycoder I've had that in my answer all along. :) But good piece of software.

Sorry, didn't check...just saw that comment and wanted to link to it in this thread. ;-(

I would recommend ShareX. It can take screenshots and capture gifs, but it also immediately uploads them to imgur and provides you a link. With this, you don't have to worry about the SE upload limit because you can just point to the imgur link directly instead of going through the upload dialog.

@JoshSilveous while that is super convenient. I would urge you to not simply use imgur. All images need to be hosted on SE. Now if you can not make the gif under 2mb, that is a different issue, but then and only then should an external host be used.

@David But StackExchange's host is just a subdomain of imgur (stack.imgur.com). Unless StackExchange gets some kind of priority on imgur, why does it matter? The host is the same, the only difference is that it doesn't use "stack" in the domain.

@JoshSilveous yes SE uses imgur, but it is very different. Imgur guaranties the the i.stack.imgur images will never be deleted. I do not trust them on their regular site.

The recording software
The top two are by far the most used (on this site):

LICEcap Windows and OSX installer

GifCam Windows only, but no install (yay)

ScreenToGif Newer app, looks very good, Windows only, no install (yay)

peek Linux only

Do note that these all can be run on linux using Wine.
There are many other ways, such as recording your screen, and then later converting to .gif (and in some cases that is better) but 98% of the time it is way easier to just use one of the options above.
Making the gif
This is the easiest and the hardest part, I'll explain.
All you have to do is hit "Record"

But then you messed up one of the steps in blender you were trying to show off. (start again)
You forgot to turn on Screencast Keys, or KeyCastOW (both how I display the key presses). (start again)
You realize half way through that you are only recording half of the 3D view. (start again)
You took way too long, and now have a 20mb gif. :( (start again)
Blender crashes. (start again)
Things that never go wrong (when you JUST made that exact same thing) go wrong now that you are recording a gif. (start again)

So it is easy to record a gif, it is hard to get it right.
You will quickly gain a new appreciation for all those that make hour long tutorials. I digress, back to the gifs.
Reducing the Size
You want to aim for the smallest file size possible. The three parts of that are how big you make the gif, how long, and what FPS.
I (almost) always use 15 fps.
I (almost) always make my gifs 650px by 400px.
As short as I can make the gif without making it unclear what is happening.
This is NOT how you want blender to look when you are making a gif.

It is very hard to keep all actions in the gif capture window.
Instead change blender to look something like this:

Now everything you do in the 3D view will be recorded.
Publish on BSE
The biggest reason to aim for a small file size (under 2mb) is so you can use stack exchange's built in image upload and hosting.
If you do have a gif under 2mb then you can add it to your question or answer like any other image. By using the add image button, or simply pressing CtrlG.

However if it is over 2mb, then you will have to change the gif to get it under the 2mb limit. Crop it, if there is extra space in the gif that really does not need to be there - crop it out. Try different compression settings (I've found screenToGif has pretty good compression) that is the next easiest. If the gif looks too poor at the lower quality, then change the number of colors and re-record. If you reduce the variety of colors, the file will get smaller.
Please do not use an external image host. Even if you answer looks a tad better now with the uncompressed gif, eventually your answer will be broken. And dead links are worse than deleted default cubes.

Great post. I mention in Solution 2 here that both licecap and gifcam can run under wine on linux.

Also, you want to make sure that you enable capture cursor if you want to make your mouse show in the gif   (as in here) http://i.stack.imgur.com/9LUMe.gif

Note that both Gifcam and LICEcap will work on linux via wine. Some of Gifcam's options will not be available, but basic operation will be fine.

+1 for the "making the GIF" process!  I just spent 5 hours failing at making a simple screen recording to send to a friend and I think every one of those happened!  I'm also interested to see those other recorder options too as LICEcap doesn't work properly on my tablet.

So I've tried all three, LiceCAP works fine on my workstation but not on my Surface tablet, GifCam and ScreenToGif both work fine.  ScreenToGif has a lot more features (including saving to a video file), but makes the computer lag a little while recording (doesn't affect the recording though).

My favorite GIF capture application is Gyazo. You can do screenshots and GIF capture, and it instantly uploads it to the web when you take it. Then just copy/paste the URL into SE.

You can make gif's using blender and GIMP.
Three ways you can get original frames from blender -

Render an animation. Depending on what you want to show you can setup an animation in blender and render the animation to images. You can also use the viewports opengl render option.
Accumulate a series of screenshots. Blender can take a screenshot of it's window. Take a screenshot at each stage that you want to display in the gif.
Make a screencast. Blender can also automatically take a series of screenshots as you perform your task. There are settings in preferences under system to adjust the framerate of a screencast. The screenshots will be saved based on your render settings for location and filetype.

Making the gif -
Once you have a series of frames to use for your gif, you can open them in gimp. By using File->Open As Layers... you can select multiple images and have each one added as a new layer. Note that this will add the selected images to the current image so you may want to close all open images before doing this.

Select and crop the image to the area you want in the gif. To reduce the filesize of the gif use Filter->Animation->Optimise (for GIF). This removes duplicated areas from each layer, leaving them mostly transparent and the result is opened in a new image.

Then export the image and give it a .gif suffix and you will get the options dialog for saving the gif, be sure to enable "as animation".

The gif's you save can then be added to your answer the same as any other image.

Could you show how you can change the delay between frames by editing the layer name. I always optimise (difference) must do a test one day.

You can rename the layer to customise the delay of each frame - it will have (100ms) in the name. If you want the same delay for each frame you can change the export settings for delay and tick Use delay entered above for all frames which will override the delay in the layer names.

According to the gimp docs optimize (gif) also reduces the size of the layer.

There's definitely not a single best process. I hope this thread fills up with people weighing in on their method.
Linux here.. (Ubuntu) -- not crossplatform
My solution involves a few prerequisits

(optional) Kazam, you could use Blender's Screencast to create *.png
Blender's VSE, (hah! you totally have this already!)
FFmpeg's for the convert command,
gifsicle "command line automated gifs",
A Blender add-on called BCPrompt (disclaimer I wrote this add-on).

The instructions don't quite capture how simple this is to do :)

use Kazam (screencapture software with UI) to record a selected screen area to a .mp4. (hit start, do your thing, hit stop, save to .mp4)

When you make mistakes you can undo, or restart the demoing without restarting the kazam recording.

Import the .mp4 to Blender's VSE, and edit it till it shows only the  most essential frames.
Now I'm ready to render the clip as a set of .pngs, but first I need to set the correct render dimensions and the start and end frame. With the strip/meta strip active I got to console and execute a few commands included with the BCPrompt add-on.
>>> dandc     (ctrl+Enter is mapped to execute a command from console)

the dandc commands does these two things for you:

sets render-output's width and height from active strip's dimensions.
sets start and end-frame from active strip's extents.

Render the VSE to *.png to some /Path/to/folder/ either via UI or
>>> anim /Path/to/folder/

Once the render is complete I execute
>>> ogif /Path/to/folder/ 256 24

this outputs two animated gifs of the *.png in that folder

1 non optimized called animated.gif
1 optimized to 256 colors and 24 fps called opt_256_animated_24fps.gif

To get the generated gif into the browser I can execute system commands from the python console using an exclamation to prefix the line. (this turns the pyconsole into a lightweight terminal)
>>> !nautilus /Path/to/folder/

will open nautilus at the given folder and I can drag the     optimized.gif to the BlenderStackExchange window.

ffmpeg is also capable of producing gif files using the palettegen and paletteuse filters.

@Skrylar yep https://gist.github.com/zeffii/59d1e1b3ebbab0d75438 -- I may still use that , thanks for the reminder.

The convert command is imagemagick, not FFMpeg

I use regular screen capture tools (anything to make a video), then upload the video to ezgif.com.
I currently switch between Quicktime and Monosnap (but I'm on a Mac). They both work well, but for different situations. Then I upload the result to ezgif for editing and "gif-making." This site lets me optimize with compression, cutting, frame rate, etc., and does it all rather quickly.
Let me know if you want more details, or a gif of the process :-)

Still working in 2.92:
To convert an existing image-sequence or movie-file, the Bligify add-on wraps ImageMagick and Gifsicle, and can be called from inside the VSE. You must give it the paths to those executables in its set-up panel.
At least, on Ubuntu, the .blend, with the paths set, must be saved as a startup for the paths to persist between sessions, unless you want to go in and tweak the script.

I use byzanz which is in the ubuntu repos, along with byzanz-record-window
A quick search also yields this, which I haven't tried.
If you prefer a graphic method there's also silentcast but I find its UI a bit confusing.
Another solution is using the internal blender screencast command, saving the output to ogv and using the script in this answer to convert to gif
Or render to png's and use
convert -delay 10 -loop 0 *.png -layers OptimizeFrame animation.gif

to convert to gif, and
gifsicle -O3 animation.gif --colors 256 -o out.gif

will optimize a bit further

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Winter bash 2015 Countdown
Last year there was the 2014 Winter Bash.
Is there going to be a 2015 Winter Bash, and if so, when?
We already knew by November 21st that we had the option to opt into the winter hats, but it is now November 29th (nearly December) and no one knows whether or not, or even when the 2015 hats will be.

Probably better asked on the main meta.

We will usually put up a post when it's time to see if people want to participate.

@iKlsR A better question would be, when will that post be?

@X-27 When we know.

lol, ok :-) I guess we just wait......

Got an email from SE "This year's event will start on 14 December 2015 and run up to and including 03 January 2016."

Cool! Can't wait for the craziness to begin :D

whistles
Winter Bash 2015

Thanks! Is that countdown in minutes?

Yes, it's minutes.


text:
what to do when a question is marked as duplicate and clearly isn't?
In the case of this question, there are 5 moderators marking it duplicate.
The answer referenced doesn't answer the question asked. it concerning completely different keyboard layout than the one being asked about.
Searching for home/end/page up or down does not give any insight to using the Home key on a mac book. Emulating numpad or 3 button mouse will not press home key for a mac user. The information is not provided in the referenced answer.
So, no one is reading what the poster asked, they all just assumed the OP is trying to use the numberpad.
How do I flag as not a duplicate/ needs to be read, not just assumed/ etc?

I get that on a PC keyboard disabling the NumLock provides a Home key, and thus, emulating numpad would provide that key. But this is not true for mac. mac only outputs numbers from numpad. there is no 'numlock' option. so, just enabling numpad emulation is not sufficient to give access to the 'Home-Key' command on a mac book keyboard. You need to use the mac specific shortcut.

In the future you can flag the question or bring it up here, pinging people in chat or casting a reopen vote are valid as well.

"What to do" is bring it up in the meta ;-)
Your FIRST step should be to make sure your question is CLEARLY different (yours is) and comment to that effect (you did). If that doesn't work, bring it to the meta (which you did). These three tools are what StackExchange provides to moderate these kinds of problems.

Thanks for bringing this up on meta :)
I've reopened the post in question.
Once you have 3000 reputation you'll be able to cast close and reopen votes directly. Until then, leave a comment and/or post a meta question, just like you've done here.
Also, with the exception of David (note the ♦), all of the users who closed that question are normal users. SE uses a privilege system which allows anyone to help moderate the site.


text:
How do i upload a screencast video to my Blender question?
I would like to include a screencast video in my Blender question, but I do not know how to upload a video.  It is in AVI JPEG format currently.
Thank you!

Also see http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/404/599


text:
Newbie question: New to the board, is it OK to post Jing video screencaps?
I'm new to blender, and I will surely have many questions in the weeks to come.  This is a visual platform, so I like to use screencap video to show my points.  Is it OK to post links to SWF videos from something like Jing?

I think this question belong in [meta]

Yes probably a question for meta, not for BSE. Any additional helpful information that aids in clarifying your question is always welcome but be sure to keep it relevant and straight to the point. Describing the problem or embedding an image is always preferable to remotely hosted links or videos. Also don't link to stuff that requires installing software (flash player) or logging in or registering. If possible embedding a short animated GIF is preferred

Related - http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/608/how-do-i-ask-a-question-that-is-hard-to-describe and http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/963/what-is-the-process-for-creating-gifs-for-questions-and-answers and http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/817/how-to-record-steps-in-blender

The only moving images supported as part of the post are Gif, and have to be under 2mb. No other video format is supported (thankfully!).
For other formats, or longer videos, you can add links to other hosts as part of the text in your post.
Few things to keep in mind:
Your question in BSE should have a clear explanation of the issue you want to resolve as text and should be understandable besides the video. Don't just post: "watch this video and tell me how to fix it".
Think of video as additional support to clarify the issue.
Please keep all videos short and to the point. Don't expect people to watch for a long time while you ramble on. Concise and clear questions get better answers.
Also please take some time and read the help section to familiarize yourself with the site and understand the rules: https://blender.stackexchange.com/help

I think they have to be under 2 MiB in order to upload them from a post, but you can embed them if you upload to imgur directly


text:
Can we add a "Low Quality" reason to the close vote?
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to be seeing a lot more very low-quality posts than before. Some, like this one, seem almost unsalvageable (especially pre-edit):  Object Merge ShortCut
EDIT: This is an even better example: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53213/make-human-import-intro-blender-and-export-blend-animation-to-three-js
Even editing the question would have to involve a number of assumptions about what the OP is even trying to ask.
I don't want to discourage people from participating, but I DO want to discourage them from blurting out the first set of words that comes to mind and putting a question-mark at the end of it. There should be a good close reason for posts that just can't be improved by anyone but the OP.
But, there's no "Low Quality" close reason. I'm thinking of one like on SuperUser:

Very low quality
This question has severe formatting or content problems. This question is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.

Turns out... this is a "flag reason" that I somehow overlooked. Why would we have such a reason for a flag, but not close?

"blurting out the first set of words that comes to mind and putting a question-mark at the end of it." This actually describes remarkably well what a lot of questions appear like.

I suspect that the site has become large enough to be found by people with Blender questions (YAY!!) But that's attracting lots of askers who seem to be unfamiliar with SE, and most of them don't pick up on the clues that there's more research to be done about how to use this site, than there would be with any other new-found forum. (I can sympathize with the thought process that just doesn't notice how different SE is, and it just doesn't trigger that they need to figure out how to use it differently from any other forum on the web).

In the past we've used "unclear what your asking" for this. It seems pretty applicable to the two questions you linked, imo.

That's sounds more reasonable than adding a new reason. Care to make that an answer? ;-)

It seems to me that the existing "unclear what you're asking" close reason covers this pretty well already.
I also think it's less likely to come across as "your question is bad", something which "low quality" could quite easily do.


text:
Add images to stack exchange questions
I still can't add images to questions here on this forum, I hit image upload (ctrl-g) it uploads and shows the image in a separate window and then the only thing I can click is "cancel and add another image". Or I can click outside the upload window, but then it does not upload. I can't click "use this image" or anything that would confirm the upload. I'm on a Mac using Safari (Version 8.0.7 (10600.7.12))

Just FYI, this post might get migrated to "meta.Blender.StackExchange.com" Don't let that worry you, it's just a better place for meta-discussion ;-)

...and welcome to Blender.SE!

We do not support old versions of browsers - the current version of Safari is 9.1.

Stack Exchange sites are Not forums. They use a very specific, Q&A format.

You can only upload images in a supported format: jpg, PNG, tiff, bmp or gif.
If you try to upload an unsupported file type, should show you a warning :

Also, see if you can scroll around the new window that's created. You should see something like this:

It's possible that the button is just hidden at the bottom of the window. Lastly, try a different browser to find out if it's a browser compatibility issue.
Images are limited to 2Mb in size. For larger images or unsupported formats consider uploading to a different host and adding the link to it on your post.

Pngs work fine for me?

I use pngs for all my screen shots, works fine for me.

Same, op should probably try another browser.

@Matt PNGs, jpg and Gif files are supported.

My mistake. I thought I remembered trying to upload a png and getting rejected. Thanks

If the keyboard shortcut doesn't work try using the icon to add images:

Hi Guys thanks for all the answers. Using the image button or the upload image brings up the window you show, and I see my image in it. I tried firefox in firefox I see the add image button. On a Safari it snaps the pop-up window right to the bottom right corner and there is no resizing that is going to help me to actually be able to click the add picture button. I guess I can't use Safai with Stack Exchange. I'll just use Firefox, than. Thanks again for the replies.

With Safari don't works (I have a Mac), so try installing Google Chrome


text:
Where is the "Include your .blend" button?
I have to say the GiantCowFilms services are really amazing. It seems they are "official BSE .blend cloud", at least from my point of view (orthographic?). The ability to post a .blend file, link it to a question, etc, is amazing. (Did you try his .HDRs ?)
But how can a newcomer know that?
Asking a question allows many things but no link to this service.

It seems we need a "post your blend" button. The blender icon should help newbies to find the good tool.

Why not?
How to make newbies life easier? (and ours too!)
Do you have an idea ? (about that... :) )

Well, we do have a user script to add such a button; however, only users familiar with blend-exchange install the user script, so it doesn't help much in this case. We are also running a community promotion ad that appears on the sidebar, which helps a little bit. Overall though, full integration would be nice. Even better, though, would be a stack-exchange guaranteed and funded (or even maintained) service.

@GiantCowFilms 100% agreed. Very cool for everyone but newbs...

Exactly the issue :/

@GiantCowFilms not about you hosting this, the future of this service if you leave us (please don't!!) but some questions could be asked.

As far as the future, the code is open source, and as long as I give warning, someone else could take over the service. I'd only have to setup a redirect for the domain (which I don't intend to party with anytime soon). If I got run over by a bus (died suddenly), something might go wrong though. But I don't intend for that to happen any time soon either.

I want to officially endorse a proper built in integration (so any staff wondering across this post know that blend-exchange is ready).
Firstly, we already have an embed page (http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/eembedUpload/?qurl=[url of question])
which is ready for use for use in a popup window (I can easily add iframe support as well if need be). Also, the code is open source if any stack exchange developers would rather just make their own changes.
All that being said, I think we'd all prefer if SE acquired a proper file hosting service, this one has limited funds and limited space :/.

I wonder if "I" can accept this answer.

Sure, but wouldn't help much. SE is the one we need to be endorsing ideas. :/

wait and see...


text:
Downvote Flagging
I am a user of BSE and very interested in Blender (#1 this week; yay). However, I have never asked a question on META, so bear with me.
A Quick Intro to my Situation
I just recently passed 1000 rep, and I have gotten to that mark very quickly after letting my account sit around for the first three months after my first question. Now that I'm here, I'm noticing a new phenomenon: People who downvote perfectly fine answers.
Now it isn't that big a deal; it is only -2 rep, but what gets to me is the negativity behind it. I woke up the other morning and found one of my answers downvoted for no apparent reason and with no comment explaining why.
My Question
Does anyone know if Stack Exchange people are planning to add a function where downvotes can be flagged and considered worthwhile or not? Does anyone think such an idea might be useful?
Any thoughts appreciated!

Related: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/q/488/599

I think it has something to do with wanting to earn the "critic" badge...you have to cast a downvote.  In my opinion, it is difficult to find a question/answer on this forum that really deserves a downvote, so people might just randomly pick something to downvote so they can move forward in badge-earning.

@WishyQ Haha. Ouch, but probably true.

"...the negativity behind it?" How do you know what's behind it? I know it feels bad to get a downvote on an answer you took time to craft so that it would be worthy of SE, but there's no way to know WHO downvoted, let alone their intention. If there's a problem with a good question or answer getting lots of downvotes, there is already a mechanism in place for handling it... it's called "meta.blender.stackexchange.com"

I totally agree that a DV without a comment is unhelpful, but assigning motive to it is less helpful. It's just a critique... not an insult.

What I used to do in my early days was whenever I got a dvote was to read my post again and see if anything could be improved. Sometimes you are not in the wrong but you can use it as a positive "growing" experience. Flush out your answer more, throw in a blend, link to relevant articles etc.

I've been down voted few days ago, and looks like the person who down voted my answer (I think) didn't read the answer well enough! He even decided to Bounty the question (even though it's not his question) and that brought me more votes. Yet in other cases, it appeared to be my mistake, when I read the question again, I gave the wrong answer, irrelevant to the question, and I deserve that down vote.

Short answer: nope.
You will probably never see a "flag the DV" type of thing for a number of reasons.

All votes up or down, are completely anonymous. So it is not as if a mod could do anything to a user who casts a "bad" DVs.
Votes are very subjective; and most of the time* there is no way to say definitively that a vote was "bad".  What may be helpful and a good answer or question to you, may just look like a low effort link only answer to the next guy. Further more some "noob" questions tend to get DVed just because they are so simple, but everybody's knowledge of blender (and the SE system) is very different; so what may be "duh" for gandalf is a huge stumbling block for this new guy.
DV's can help a new user learn the SE system, and what and how fits in this site.

While commenting after you DV a post is nice (and very encouraged) it is not required. However when you DV with no comment (like what prompted the OP to ask this here) it leaves the OP in the dark, and most of the time he will not learn anything from it.
I too have had many of my posts DVed for no apparent reason; don't worry about it. There is always a chance that you beat somebody to answer the question and now they're mad, or some other dumb and petty reason.
If you wrote a good answer and you know what you are talking about (not one of those "maybe you should try X" sort of answers) then don't take a stray DV to heart.
If you point me to your answer that was DVed, I may be ably to guess as to why it was DVed.

* There is a thing called serial voting, and several variants, such as bullying, and serial down voting, for things such as those the system and us mods can and do do something.

Thank you very much!

For the record, I don't normally go around downvoting beginner questions.. (I even upvoted this one!)

@David Hey, I was just wondering, do people not earn reputation on meta?

@ShadyPuck nope, all site metas do not have rep, it is directly linked to your main site account. However you do get separate badges on metas.

@David  Would it be possible to add a function to the site: when a downvote is cast, a box will pop up in which the voter can explain briefly the critique, and the downvote will not be registered unless a reason is given ?  This would be very helpful.  I noticed that when I added a question, "Why are you downvoting this?", to my downvoted question, the downvotes ended.

@WishyQ Nope, this and many, many, many variants have been proposed for several years on meta.stackexchange, not likely this will ever happen. Safest way to avoid downvotes is to ask "good" questions and write clear answers.


text:
Is this an acceptable place to ask for feedback on a sculpt? If not what would be a better place?
Feedback from people who know what they are doing would be helpful in getting better, but I do not know a great place to ask for that feedback.

Generally the point of meta is for discussing the site, if that's what your question is.

No BSE is not for Critiques. (See point six What questions should be definitely off-topic?) Any question like you described would get closed as off topic.
You could try in our chat room there is almost always somebody there, but I dont know how much help you will get.
A much better place for feedback is on blender artists. There is a entire thread for Focused Critiques.

Try CG Stack Extchange, I guess that would be the right place to do so, since I've seen a post there requesting feedback, and nobody seems to object: https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/
Still make sure to ask the right question, as in asking, what do you think is missing? Or should I do it this way? Rather than How do you like it?

On Computer Graphics Stack Exchange a request for an artistic review would be off topic, but a review of code that produces or works with models could be on topic depending on the context. A review of a hand sculpted model would be off topic. As a rough guide, if you're writing software your question is likely to be on topic, while if you're using software it is likely off topic. Research and algorithm questions are also on topic though, so for specific details see the Computer Graphics on topic page.

@trichoplax http://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/2556/what-physical-properties-are-lacking-to-keep-this-3d-scene-from-looking-like-a

I thought that might be the example you were thinking of - it's a good way of seeing that the scope isn't obvious. In that case it's asking about which physical effects need to be included, rather than asking for a review of just the model. Some answers do include criticism of the model though, since that's part of what breaks the realism.

I think that the type of review question that the author of this meta question has in mind would be off topic, but Computer Graphics may well be an appropriate site for some of the people who find this meta question in future. Exactly what is on topic can't be easily summed up in comments, but there's the on topic page and also Computer Graphics chat for anyone with further queries.

Exactly it's a feedback request of a specific aspect concerning an artistic opinion based matter


text:
What is a rollback operation?
What is a rollback operation, what is it used for?

See What is a 'rollback'? and the bottom paragraph of the editing section in the help center.
Simply put, a rollback reverts an edit (or edits) on a post, returning it to a former state.
To roll a post back:

Click the timestamp below the post to view the edit history

Click the "rollback" button next to the revision you wish to revert to.

UVed for the meta meta, an example image from this post, nice one!

@gnadalf3 Is there a required reputation to use it? I can't find "last modified" timestamp.

@Georges Updated answer

Thanks, I clicked the timestamp, all I get is (source) and (link), no (rollback) or (edit) @gandalf3

@Georges I can't find it explicitly mentioned anywhere, but perhaps you need edit privileges

Thanks @gandalf3

@Georges As gandalf already said, you need the edit privilege (2000) to perform a roll back on a post that is not your own and is not a community wiki. For CWs the required rep is 100, and you can always edit your own posts.


text:
What to do with abandoned questions?
We have a large amount of abandoned or zombie questions. They keep popping up as modified by community...
For most of them there there is not enough info to answer, but the user never bothered updating the post.
What is the best way to close such "abandoned" questions.
The tag unclear on what you are asking doesn't really apply for most of them.

As stated in Old, abandoned questions with unaccepted answers we should not close a question just to get rid of it.
We should not be closing questions like Sharp edges while maintaining circular shape, Custom trackpad pan/zoom/rotate behavior add-on, Using a BI texture in Cycles, Creases at cutoff parts of normal map wrap, etc.
Here is an example of one that I CVed: Blender will not render audio visualizer.
There is no way to ever answer (for one thing it may be a hardware issue, but that is besides the point of this answer), the OP was asked for clarification but never responded. Yes his problem maybe clear, "my render not working now" but that does not make an answerable question. We need more info from to even guess what is going on. That is exactly the type that should of been closed 5 months ago; questions that are vague enough so that it will get guesses at best, and likely low quality "maybe you should try" type of answers.
(Last example) this question should be Dved, and closed. It is unclear, and not even very understandable.
In this meta answer it is suggested to close as unclear.
Jeff Atwood (SE founder) responding (Unresponsive askers abandon questions) about questions that are very specific to the OP, says that it is ok to just delete those.
Finally the SE system will automatically delete questions meeting the following criteria:

Closed more than 9 days ago
Not closed as a duplicate
Score <= 0
Not locked
No answers with a score > 0
No accepted answer
No pending reopen votes
No edits in the past 9 days

source

Now while you are going through the unanswered list, don't just CV the bad ones.

Edit any questions to make them better. Then they might just get answered.
Edit any so so answers, when they become good answer they will get UVs, which will draw more attention to the question.
UV any good answers and questions, just because it is unanswered does not make it a bad question.
Answer (now who would think of a thing like that) any that just slipped through the cracks.
Don't be afraid to DV bad questions and answers, if it is a "bad" post DV it.


text:
more than one question per post
We've been enforcing a one question per post rule that is not clear at all on the help section. Nowhere in the info does it say that.
The rule makes a lot of sense so that folks don't have to guess if the answer for "editing curves" is on a question about "rendering video" for example.
Should this be added into the tour or or the text on this page https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/asking?

You might want to put this on global meta since we can't change the necessary sections and this really should be in there somewhere IMO.

It is completely agreed across all SE sites that you ask one question per question. (asking multiple questions is ok.)
One post with multiple questions or multiple posts?
Can I ask only one question per post
Now what to do to let new users know...
We can only edit this part, and the top site message on the tour page.

Now in the help center we can only edit this and a message at the top of the main help page
So my best suggestion is to comment on any new user's post that asks more then one question, and tell them (nicely) that you only ask one at a time.
If they do not edit, then DV.

To clarify the first paragraph, "posts" are called "questions" in SE jargon. So that translates to "please ask one thing per question (as in 'post'). If you have other things to ask, posting multiple questions (as in 'posts') is accepted".

@gandalf3 My 2 cents: Not all new users understand SE jargon though, and the majority of SE users are new users. And while it is fairly obvious in translation, skipping a translation step can only aid in communication. I feel the "one question per post" guideline could be more clearly outlined

@360ueck Hence my attempt at a clarification


text:
What makes a question active?
Sometimes when I browse the questions list with the "active" filter, some questions appear as if they were recently modified, but in fact they aren't.
Hovering the mouse on the active tab gives this short description

Questions that have been asked, answered, or updated recently

This question for example is marked as active today , but all the timestamps are from March 7th.
Is this a normal behavior?

In short, yep this is normal.
If you look at the sidebar it says "active  today" as you correctly noted, there is no recreant votes, comments, answers, or edits.
This is one example of where the community bot will "bump" a question so it does not fade away without notice. If you look at the post history is says "     Bumped by Community user."
You can read more about What can cause a question to be bumped?


text:
Following a thread sequence when edited
How to understand what happens is this two situations :

an answer when the question has been edited and so the answer has no sense anymore
an answer which was edited (by someone else) but the related comments are still there (so these comments have no sense anymore)

?

Are you asking what should be done when these things occur? Or..?

@gandalf3 yes, what should be done (and I have the answer by David below) and maybe more generally the global intention of the site (i am still discovering). Q/A ok, but also some kind of cookbooks catalog to solve many situations and the more factual as possible ? ... for kidding, I could try to edit the initial question with this new question so that the answer may become partially obsolete... ; )

OK to respond to your last point "obsolete comments" question - any time a comment is no longer needed say for example: the post was edited, a bounty is long gone, other comments were deleted, etc. Flag the comment as obsolete.

If there is an answer, especially a good and UVed one, but the question has since been edited and now it no longer answers the new question, you have a few options depending on the circumstances.
Say the question was simple, and got a answer; however now the OP (a new SE user) comes back and has a new question, so he edits his question. In that case do nothing to the answer, the OP should be made aware that this is not how SE works, and you could flag the question (please use a custom message saying in a few words what happened).
Now there is a question, a bit unclear, it gets answered. The OP comes back and edits, maybe adds a blend file, and now that answer definitely does not answer the question. In this case DV the answer. It would be nice if you also left a comment as to why you are DVing the answer.
The third scenario - the question doesn't really matter, its there gets an answer then the OP edits and might even answer himself. Before it got edited, a different user gave a really good answer, except in this particular case it had nothing to do with the problem the OP was having. As later discovered, it was because the OP had spilled grape juice on his computer, which killed only part of his hard drive.  In this case I would not DV the answer, I might cast a close vote on the question as "too localized," but I would not do anything to the answer (you could UV it if it helps you.)
(did this come up from this answer?)

A possible example of both points is in my answer here, and the comments below.

about "flagging a comment as obsolete", does this notify the person who wrote the comment too? I am trying to know what's the correct way to tell cegatron that I deleted my comment and I'm not sure if flagging it is the best way to do that. this meta question says it's good practice to clean up comments and I thought cegatron will delete his but he didn't..

@root no, flagging or deleting your comment will not alert the other user(s). When you flag a comment only the mods see your flag. In the linked answer cegaton did delete one of his comments. I deleted the other one that was left. You have two ways to clean up comments like that. 1) flag one of the comments as obsolete. 2) if it is an active user, ask the user (in chat) if they want to remove their comment.


text:
When should an opinion based question be flagged?
Some questions post an image and ask: How can I make this effect. Is this considered an opinion based question? There will always be many answers, many right answers, and really there is no right and wrong as an answer for this kind of questions, which makes them opinion based. Yet, they are quite informative, you get to see how different people approach different ways to make a model, rig, create shaders..etc. My question is, should these be reported? And if not, doesn't that create a bias, and make the whole thing depend on luck? I've seen this happening (not to me, this question is not personal) and it's not fair, some questions were reported and removed immediately, others were lucky enough to get the interested person before the flag person, and got many answers and votes, which kept them open. Considering that the target of BSE is the good of all, shouldn't we be more tolerable?

Related: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/476/should-we-expand-our-scope-to-allow-simple-howtos/

ok, take two :)
(if you want to read about "How do I do X" type of questions see my first answer.)
Lets start with the close reason:

primarily opinion-based
  Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.

As stated on the main meta it partially exists just so there are standard close reason across the SE network.
As you alluded to, that does not fit blender and our hugely diverse workflows very well.
A question that is asking, for example how to model something, absolutely don't close it as primarily opinion based just because there are several different ways to do it. (1, 2, 3, 4)
I would use that reason any time the question is more of a open ended discussion then a real answerable question. Or it is something along the lines of "What is the best ____?". However just because best is in the title does not mean it should be closed.
Here are all examples of questions that have been closed as primarily opinion based, and rightly so.
Switch from Mac to PC?
What are the benefits of the different cylinder caps?
Do I need to even use blueprints?
Is Blender right for me? - A photographer creating 3d renderings (this one here is of particular interest, it is, in your words a "well presented question" yet how can we answer whether or not it is the right choice for him?)
In short, CV as primarily opinion based when there can be no definitive answer, anyone who answers will just be sharing his idea or "opinion."

First I do not consider "How do I do X" type of questions primarily opinion based. If we are going to say that for example this is primarily opinion based, then nearly every question that is not asking what a specific button does would be closed as such. (You could make the argument that it is too broad, but more on that later.)
I too have seen some ambiguity in how these "How do I do X" questions are handled.
We have many that are well received, and get good, helpful answers - great!
I assume you want to talk about the others that get closed.
I think the difference comes in what are they asking.

Does the OP know what they are looking for? (example 10k link)
How "big" of a topic is this? (Is the question asking how to make a cycles shader, or how to make a movie?) Question have to be targeted, a huge open ended questions off topic, and will be closed as "too broad."
Is this topical for our site? (Is the question asking how to import a fbx made in blender into ogre?) Hint: answer for this example is no, CV it.

So if you think it is or could be a good question maybe after an edit, then UV it. If already closed cast a reopen vote, (you need 3000 rep for that privilege).
Yes, there are some cases where I really have no idea why a question got closed, we should welcome them to BSE, not insta-close their question.
However there are many cases where we are very, very nice to new users, with questions that are so unclear, or show no effort yet expect not only to show exactly "how to do X," but a blend file too (who needs to read the answer when you can get somebody to just do it for you.); that I can not possibly say at this point that we should be more tolerant.
Yes, lets try to get rid of this ambiguity and treat all the "How do I do X" questions, that really are of the same quality the same.

Here are some examples:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/40069/2217 That is a bad question on many levels. Link only, no effort, and unclear. It rightly should of been closed.
How to achieve this effect (screen tearing glitch) in Blender, and what is this effect called? This question, may appear similar to the example above, is substantially different. While the OP does no know what to call what he is trying to make, he make a good effort to describe it, not just simply a link or a picture. Also it is targeted, we know this is limited to post production.

I agree with everything you said, you still haven't answered my question though, what is considered opinion based? Why is this category an option, my point was that, this reason is too vague, it could be largely misinterpreted. Check this question for example: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/52521/timothy-reynolds-low-poly-mountain-terrain

ok, (I'm actually editing my answer now) I some how missed that you were asking about the CV reason, I thought you were asking about "How do I do X" type of questions. (I do have this problem of missing the title sometimes.)

I agree again, but you still haven't answered my question, let me put it this way: A user just joined BSE, he read carefully the rules, one of them is "Don't ask opinion based questions" flag them, what he would understand of this? I'm not questioning people's behavior, I'm questioning this category, since it's not understood, the difference between the examples you added, is the difference between a well explained question, and a lazy link based youtube question, the link to the question I have in my previous comment, is obviously opinion based, I won't vote to close it, others might.

I understood from your first comment, and am writing another answer. Just I had started that first answer, may as well finish it. (still not sure how I missed your whole point, Oh well :) )

Thank you for taking the effort @David my point is that, I don't think that opinion base "well presented questions" should be removed, on the other hand all "bad presented questions" should be requested to be edited, or removed.

it's either that, or I don't understand what "opinion based" means, so I asked the question :)

I was about to ask another question when I saw this one. My question was "when is it justified to give an answer that suggest another approach for the problem ?"
This kind of answer is subjective surely.
As an example, I have seen several questions about boolean modifier which may later leads to "hey... now..." "I cannot use subsurf or edge loop" or "I have a bad rendering due to ngons"...
So... is this needs to be another question or is it part of the opinion based subject ?

Why you think it wouldn't be justified to provide another approach to solve the same problem? anyways I guess you should start a new question in the meta, since you just posted a question as an answer ;)

@Georges you are right, but two points : concerning the subjective answer which can be "I dont answer directly but I give another way to do it" : how to know if the question is not simplified and hide a more complex problem ?... for the aspect to ask another question... yes... I will do it even if I think this is nearly the same subject. ; )

This is why I usually ask the OP to provide more details before I post an answer, unless the problem is obvious, this is why you see many answers that are not related to the question, usually the question is edited after the answer is provided to give more details. Anyways, almost every process in Blender has many ways to do it, some ways are better than others, some are just different, with no preference, so why wouldn't it be justified to have many answers to the same question, when they are providing different approaches?

even answers that seem to be the wrong answer, can be the right answer to people reading the question later

@Georges, I have posted this http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/1119/how-subjective-may-be-an-answer


text:
Aggressive posting for rep
I've noticed that some posters , in my opinion, are aggressively posting to gain reputation at the expense of legitimate content.
I can't offer up any immediate solution(s). But, I think, that as a community, if that trend continues, BSE becomes more of a game than the professional forum that it currently is.

Link to the examples in question would be helpful, even just to the user.

Can you elaborate on why you think this? Perhaps some examples?

It's something I've noticed. I prefer to not throw any individual under a buss.

@Dontwalk I appreciate your consideration. I intended to suggest providing examples of the behavior or language, not of any specific individuals. In hindsight I'll admit that was not at all clear. So that said, as it is now we have no way of knowing what you mean by "aggressively posting". In your own words, could you describe or paraphrase what you interpret as an "aggressive post"?

Hello. Just few words because I could feel concerned about what is said here. So... well, considering the question and the answers : yes I am new participant. Yes there is some kind of game aspect because this is new to me. Yes, I know my answers are often low level (I am just a hobbyist). But I try to take time to formalize them well and to take into account the remarks of the moderators. And surely no : this is not aggressiveness... not at all (at least, I hope !). Anyway I am not here to annoy people so feel free to express your thoughts. Sincerely yours

@Dontwalk I know what you mean (and what users you mean...) But that is not the issue really. The bottom line is that is up to us to raise the bar and to keep this site useful.
You see some bad info?
Make it better!
Be it by answering with the correct information, editing, flagging, commenting or DownVoting (and leaving a comment as to why you are doing so). Help those aggressive posters put better info out there. Maybe they will turn into aggressive and accurate information posters with a bit of guidance.
If they don't react... well don't worry, those who get routinely downvoted don't hang for a long time on the site. They do get bored after a while... If the point is getting reputation then they discover that if takes a lot of work and they walk away...
The place is public and open for moderation by those with a minimum reputation (I believe you have enough points to do some of that) Excercise your privilege and help the moderators, they can't really do everything, and are all volunteering their time and expertise the same way that you do.
If you do care for the site and find it useful, you're welcome to contribute to make it better!
But better also means keeping its diversity.
So look at it with tolerance and sense of humor.

I couldn't agree more

This and @David's answers are both excellent. It's become ever so slightly more common for askers AND answerers to think of downvotes and flags as insults or like the ban-hammer. But they're really just curation tools. You have the power to curate. Go forth and curate!

There is (almost) no limit to how often a user can answer questions.
If this user is posting lots of good answers, maybe because he is new to the site and finds all this fun, then great! The more the merrier.
However if these are low quality, then there is a problem. Low quality posts, no matter the frequency, are an issue and should be dealt with. SE has many different ways to handle them: CV, DV, edit, flag, delete.
Guidelines for reviewing low-quality posts
more guidelines
I have not seen anything out of the ordinary, (when a user is new they are likely to #1 be quite active, and #2 their posts will not be the highest quality.) Add that together and you get more then "normal" about of answers.
Hopefully the user(s) you are referring to will quickly learn that it is much more beneficial to write a few excellent answers, then it is to flood as many answers as you can while having none of them really stand out.
You can help speed up that learning process by commenting on any answer and ask for more info, (DV and comment if it is really not good), if it is really bad flag it as "very low quality."
But you could do the same things that I would do after getting a flag. Give the user some links, links to the SE good answer help page, other good answers, etc. Leave the user a comment inviting him to chat to learn more.
Finally don't reward mediocrity, if the answer doesn't deserve a DV, but is not particularity great, then don't UV it. It doesn't take long when getting little to no rep on an answer to wonder what is wrong with it.

I'd like to kindly offer some constructive criticism. Only using he/him can imply that only male users will make this mistake. Normally, I wouldn't say anything about this, as it can be a defensive topic, but I don't feel you'll interpret it that way. Since "he" is grammatically correct, and this is not a grammar forum here is a short and sweet question regarding the topic http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/48/is-there-a-correct-gender-neutral-singular-pronoun-his-versus-her-versus?newreg=781ab91584d141a09877be8c95286b2a.

@360ueck thank you for your thoughts. As you correctly observed I am not using "he" in an only masculine form. Wikipedia talks about the generic use that I am using. (In fact the question you linked to has an answer saying that it is still recognized as gender neutral term.) Now I have a question for you, when you read my answer did you really think I was singling out men? (I did only use "he" once, and used a generic "the user" all throughout my answer.)

@360ueck I invite you to come over to chat if you would like to talk more about this.

Honestly, someone accused me of using the wrong pronoun in a similar context, and when I saw the post I couldn’t resist. Now in that setting, it was a lot more relevant. But the idea is similar to this question, in that part of it has to do with one’s interpretation. I know what the user means by “aggressive” and the problem is that it isn’t objectively aggressive, just like using “him” isn’t objectively wrong, but it could hinder in someone liking the post should they interpret it that way. I’m not trying to tell you how to speak, just trying to be helpful and share what I’ve learned.

When I saw your post 2 things crossed my mind. 1) That you were speaking of every Blender user. 2) What if the person who pointed out my mistake saw this.