text:
Reccomend including a .blend file in a new question
Mighty admins of Blender Meta,
Would it be possible to add a short text, suggesting to include a .blend file in a new question?
It could make answers more relevant and specific.
Just something simple like

Many questions are way easier to answer when a .blend file is provided. But only a small percentage of users actually does it.
So.
Would it be possible to add such a suggestion, or is it going against SE purpose?
Thank you

This is mostly a duplicate of this. My opinion is that ideally I would rather answer a well-worded, illustrated question without having to download a file, save for the cases where they really are required. Suggesting a user should upload a file may encourage them to be lazy in their question writing. This would make it harder for other users to tell whether this question is the same as theirs and whether the answers are therefore relevant to their own problem.

@RayMairlot Thanks for the link, I missed it. And also thanks for your opinion, I didn't think of that. Well I guess I'll just stick to asking for .blends on each question individually :).

I'd even dare say that if a question requires a file to be answered it is most likely a bad sign. It is either too localized or a "do it for me" job that is unlikely to be helpful to anyone else in the future.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos You make a good point, sir. I still think it's a good idea to have a .blend available, but I can see the possible problems. Thanks everyone for sharing your experience :).

@RayMairlot Please, consider posting your comment as an answer, like `@Leander suggested. The comment section is a bit hard to navigate :).

@Leander Done. You're right, I should have done this.

Possible duplicate of Should all "Ask A Question" pages encourage the poster to upload their blend?

We do, as much as we can anyway. Unfortunately as far as I know we don't have any way to edit the ask a question page.
I disagree with some of the opinions expressed in the comments, I'd say a .blend is nearly always better than no .blend (there are of course times where it's not necessary, but it doesn't really hurt either). To mitigate "here's my project pls fix it" questions, ideally we want to encourage users to upload a stripped-down "minimal example" of their problem. Doing that

helps them, as often the process of isolating the problem leads to the solution (or at least helps with writing a clearer question)
helps us, as we don't need to dig through large .blends and try and reverse-engineer what the OP is attempting to do
helps blend-exchange by saving bytes
plus it alleviates some concerns users occasionally have over IP rights.

Unfortunately the only way we have to consistently communicate this to new users is by commenting and linking meta where relevant.

Good points over the pros of, especially the part about narrowing down the issue. My concern is that it all relies on actually getting users to strip the file down, which most newcomers never actually do.

Thank you for your thoughts, I couldn't agree more. This seems to be a situation where the Blender SE community can really shine :).

i totally agree with you gandalf3. And i wonder why Duarte is agreeing with u although he is the first to pin point on me when i am asking for blend files....! ..and not just one time.

My opinion is that ideally I would rather answer a well-worded, illustrated question without having to download a file, save for the cases where they really are required.
Suggesting a user should upload a file may encourage them to be lazy in their question writing. This would make it harder for other users to tell whether this question is the same as theirs and whether the answers are therefore relevant to their own problem.

Creating a totally Useless build up
Further to answer of @RayMairlot, another thing to consider is the hosting provider.
Policy for linking to blend files
Should all "Ask A Question" pages encourage the poster to upload their blend?
Often see a comment request to add a blend file to a question. The suggested host is often http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com ie permanent blend file hosting for bse provided by user @GiantCowFilms.  Similarly with those attached to answers.
Often the answer is change this setting, or plug this node in here, not here ,, As far as the Q&A is concerned there is no need for anyone else to DL the blend. From this point in time the blend file does nothing more than take up space. As we are aware from our download, pictures, desktop  and other folders that grow and grow and grow some maintenance is required, or  provide more and more storage space. (HD's have grown from Mega to Terra in 20 years, doesn't take 20yrs to fill them)
IMO In many cases using a temporary service like https://pasteall.org/blend/ would be much more suitable.  The blend file is kept for around 5 months.  Generally if the question is answerable and someone has requested the blend it is answered in less time than 5 months.
Could add a zillion links to questions / answers where I feel a permanently hosted blend file is totally unnecessary. (Sure you have seen plenty)  Does it matter if the link to blend is broken. How many answers over 5mths old even get looked at?
To sum up, consider requesting user upload blend to a temporary hosting site

Hello, bat :). I completely agree on this with you. While it's always better to have a file available, most of the files are only downloaded once/twice, so a temporary hosting seems a better idea. I'd reserve Blend-Exchange for answers only, it makes more sense there :).

Or build expiry into GCFs. ... then  assign "immortality or execution date" via a  new review queue?

That's a good point that we should be considerate of the Blend-Exchange server capacity. I try to keep the blends I post minimal in content, but I'm sure this does not occur to most new users. I also think it's case by case, and we should weigh the cost of the size against the benefit of keeping the content available.

I beg to disagree. I've downloaded quite a few files to further explore the answers, or play with the proposed settings (or the models or shaders) for my own needs. In the perfect world, a well documented answer would make downloading a file irrelevant, but in the imperfect reality of users that is not the case. Vanishing answers help no one once they are gone. Permanent answers might help some. Pasteall is of limited use... On top of that there are questions that are pretty much impossible to answer without the specifics of a file. Rigging or motion tracking are examples that come to mind.

Would concur re "imperfect reality of users"  that for the sake of argument  you have  totally missed the point.  Are you going to download the blend here https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/209481/deleting-a-hook now.... in 5 months ... in 5 years time.  Need I post 100s more similar links  to make the case?


text:
Should [raytracing] be removed?
The raytracing tag has... 0 watchers and 18 questions. Half of the questions don't have an accepted answer, and of those which do have an answer, the tag doesn't seem to add to or help filter the question:

Adaptative ray bounces in Cycles is a good question but the cycles tag seems to cover the raytracing aspect of the question.
Again, [cycles] seems to cover Why can't cycles cast one ray per image pixel, instead of rendering progressively to infinity? perfectly fine. While the argument that cycles is a very broad tag and raytracing narrows it, the rendering tag does just fine. It makes a lot of sense that if a post is tagged cycles and rendering, it's about raytracing. This makes [raytracing] superfluous in my mind.
What is branched path tracing and how is it useful? is a fantastic question but the cycles and rendering tags make the ray tracing tag unnecessary.
I think the rendering tag could substitute for raytracing here: Cycles light ray exiting the back of an object
Raytracing tag seems completely unnecessary for Boolean on cycles rays, not on mesh
Associating extra information to a ray in Cycles is probably the one question that does benefit from the tag.

The rest of the 9 answered questions are very similar.
To summarize, half of these questions never get answered and the ones that do just don't benefit from the tag. Raytracing seems to be a simple filler tag on bad questions and a useless afterthought on good questions. With those underwhelming credentials, it seems that it should be removed... Is removal a good idea?

You're right. It has been deleted and synonymized with rendering. For any one who chances on this you're probably better off asking highly technical questions on https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
  -- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Blender over the past 12 months:
                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  1          8
Users destroyed³                                  8          0
Users contacted                                   6          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue           430      1,849
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue              145        190
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue        527      3,003
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue              183      1,467
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue             2,004      7,870
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue              983      3,262
Tags merged                                       2          0
Tag synonyms proposed                             3          0
Tag synonyms created                              3          0
Questions reopened                               79         11
Questions protected                               8         48
Questions migrated                                9          3
Questions merged                                  4          0
Questions flagged⁵                                1        817
Questions closed                              1,657        869
Question flags handled⁵                         358        463
Posts unlocked                                    0          2
Posts undeleted                                  34        218
Posts locked                                      4         49
Posts deleted⁶                                1,422      6,411
Posts bumped                                      0      7,843
Comments undeleted                               11          0
Comments flagged                                  7      2,082
Comments deleted⁷                               619      5,194
Comment flags handled                           220      1,869
Answers flagged                                 164      3,193
Answer flags handled                          2,779        580
All comments on a post moved to chat              8          0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Blender without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing you all a happy new year...

Posts bumped    0      7,843 can mods bump posts?

Naw, just the Community bot.

Thought so. So then that 0 should be a "N/A"

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


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How to insert blend files into a question
I wanna ask a question about something concerning parenting in blender but I know I’d be clear if I knew how to insert blend or .mov files into my question. How do you do that on Mac?

Use this tool to post a blend file into a question https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

Thanks!........

Could you flag this as answer if it helped you?

How do u do that?

Click the grey check mark on the left below the up/down vote buttons and it becomes green.

I wanted to mark this Q as duplication, but I really can't find any. Every second question here use blend-exchange link in Question's comment. There is something wrong in a system. Seems to be still very hard discoverable ....hm


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Should popular tutorials get their own tags?
Recently I noticed the donut tag had been created. Initially, I was a bit unsure about having a tag like this; it seems like one of the first 'non-technical' tags and I wasn't sure whether there was a point to it. I understand there are a lot of donut questions that further categorisation could be useful, but do the other tags available not correctly describe what those questions are about, be it modelling, rendering or particles? If people asked a lot of question about rigging humans, would we really need a human tag when we have a rigging tag?
I understand the donut tag doesn't necessarily reference a specific tutorial, but I think we're all aware it really is just Blender Guru's tutorials generating these questions. Personally, if we were to tag such questions then I would prefer to tag them as donut-tutorial to make it clear we are referring to a specific tutorial and not just using a synonym for a torus and not just naming something that happens to be in the question. That also begs the question as to whether other tutorials (Blender Guru's Anvil tutorial comes to mind) could also do with categorisation or whether existing tags are satisfactory?
My questions are:

Do we need a donut tag?
Should the tag be renamed to donut-tutorial?
Should other tutorials (I can currently only think of the Anvil one) also get their own tags?

I'm not specifically against this new tag, I just wanted to make sure we have some kind of consensus before I retag old questions I come across.

It could be more logical to have "tutorial" tag to get them all under one roof. Other than that I didn't think any of tutorials deserve specific tags for them since after all they are about the same problems covered by usual tags

Not the bloody anvil again...

Further to  @MrZak above  could perhaps blender-guru (or some such) encompass all tutorials from that popular site. A popular addon can get its own tag outside the umbrella of addons tag.

NO, no, no and no. It is a useless categorization for BSE. A of donut tells us nothing about the question, except that the OP is probably following Price's tutorial - not really helpful for us. Each tag should be able to tell us what the question is about, (examples: modifiers, rendering, animation) not how the OP got to the point of asking that question.
For example when we get a Z fighting question we do not care what the OP is modeling, it could be an anvil, a watch, a spaceship, a submarine, etc (all tutorials we have gotten question from) nor do we care what tutorial the OP was following. The question is about Z fighting, period.
If I ask a question tagged eevee you know I'm using eevee. Or if a question is tagged shadowcatcher we know it is about the shadow catcher.
I am definitely against adding tutorial tags. The only possible benefit would be that it could make finding dups easier, but that is not a valid reason to make a useless tag.
So please nuke any tutorial inspired tags as they pop up.
Donuts are great, everybody likes them, we will always take questions about making them, but we do not need a  tag.

PS sadly this is not the first 'non-technical' tag, see error, artifacts, effects, lego and other ambiguous tags that should be cleaned up actions, splines, loop, looping, project (used as both a "blender project" and "UV project modifier").

Other confusing tags are "blender-render", "image".

I don't particularly care for the name of the tag. Nor do I believe that all videos deserve a tag. But this particular so called "tutorial" generates a lot of repeated questions.
What are tags anyway?
As defined here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/tagging

A tag is a word or phrase that describes the topic of the question. Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.

I created a tag to make it easier to find duplicates and point the users to an existing and approved answer or detailed post, as opposed to having users write the same answer over and over, or have search for endless other solutions spanned over many posts.
Note that finding duplicates is not as easy or straightforward as it seems. The search box at the top has many shortcomings, it won't deal with synonym or related terms... and if any of the search terms or text on the post is misspelled o slightly different, then the results won't show at all.
I believe a tag in this case will make it easier to get the users to the information they are looking for. Isn't that the goal of this site?

Internal BSE search indeed isn't the best one. I always use google search instead by typing in there BSE domain name and then my query

Maybe it will change it future, but based on David's answer I think we should stick to more technical tags for the minute. Most of the 'donut' questions seem to mention donut in the question body, so using the search box would find those questions without the need for the tag. (Happy to deal with removing the tag from questions if you would like.)

@RayMairlot Don't worry I'm done with the site too.

Because of this discussion? I of course did not mean any of this personally and didn't think it was being taken this way. You're obviously an incredibly valuable member of this SE community.

@RayMairlot of course not, or anything related to you. I'm just moving on. will use the current circumstances to phase out. It was fun...

Seems a lot of questions here get tasked here because of Blender Guru's tutorials, and Andrew Price doesn't have to field the questions of his own audience. I was looking for a way to keep track of them and then sort (use the BSE search) to then point them out to him and ask him to take a stab at answering them. I figured using a tag was the best way, but that got reversed per this thread here. Any suggestions to still try to make list, or not a possibility?


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David♦ Moderator resignation
Well, here is a post that even a year ago I never thought I would be writing.
I've been part of this site for six years to the day, January 21, 2014. My interest in blender caused me to get more and more involved with BSE so much so that I was one of our first three elected moderators. Over the years my enthusiasm for SE grew - this was the best place to get answers for blender questions. Slowly life moved on, and I used blender less and less (as you could probably guess from my declining answer rate); yet I was always still here, almost out of duty for this community.
Now we get to the present. I'm not going to rehash all that has transpired (the history goes back a few years, and greatly accelerated in the last four months), but the fact is that I no longer feel good about supporting SE.
So I'm resigning as a mod, and stepping away from SE as a whole.
Let me be clear, my departure has nothing to do with BSE, or any of you the users and my friends. It is solely based on the actions of SE and what kind of company SE has become.
As with anything that one embarks on for years of one's life this change leaves me saddened. Saddened for how SE has changed, and saddened because of all that I'll miss: hunting and destroying socks, helping users, interacting with other mods, but most of all the friends I gained along the way.
I'd be remiss if I did not thank some of the people that I have had the pleasure of interacting with over the years. You have helped shape this site,
you are this site. Further you helped shape me. I'm hesitant to make a list like this because I know I will not be able to list everyone.
In alphabetical order a non-exhaustive list of users that have had a impact on me and this site:
batFINGER You supply endless python answers, like the ones that came before you CodeManX, ideasman42, pink vertex and many more. Your answers are filled with a lifetime of wisdom. Your expertise in python shows through the amazing volume of answers of have written.
cegaton Thank you for working to keep this site running - for years. Your endless edits, persistent comments and all around blender knowledge is a real asset to the community.
CharlesL Our activity did not overlap much, but I will never forget the ebook we coauthored, fun times. Definitely one of the most memorable moments.
Duarte Farrajota Ramos You were one of the few active users in BSE's lull. You stepped up to be a full blown mod when no one else would. I remember you pumping out good answers, seemingly on fire. Even now, you still have passion for this community - singly handily editing whole tags.
gandalf3 Wow, where to start? Back when I first joined you were the one I wanted to be like. Top dog on the site - you could answer everything. You made gifs a standard part of answers "gandalf style gifs." Your demeanor through chat was unwavering, and your keen sense for internet privacy was something I always aspired to.
GiantCowFilms First off Thank you for building (twice) blend exchange, without that service BSE would have a lot more dead blend file links littered all over the place. Now this might be a surprise but thank you for the many times we disagreed in chat, through that I better learned to see other people's perspective, and hopefully better communicate.
iKlsR BSE's longest serving mod, first appointed in June of 2013 and served this site well since. Back in the day before we graduated, you were our only active mod. You alone had to deal with all my flags and incessant pings to fix stuff, both in chat and on the meta. Also the only user who knows it all.
Jerryno Aside from having one of the coolest user ids on the site, you have provided a wealth of knowledge through hundreds of answers. I personally have learned much from you. Your contributions to BSE will always be remembered.
Nicola Sap You are the next wave of active users. I've seen you post great answer after great answer. Keep it up, just do not burn out too quickly.
Ray Mairlot You unlike many from your era are still around and active. You have done the unrewarding work: edits and comments, the work that keeps this site running. For that I am forever grateful.
VRM You were definitely part of "the old crew". Super active back in 2015 both in chat and on BSE. Your answers were always spot on and helpful. I will always remember our interactions with fondness.
X-27 The pyromaniac stalker of the renderfarm :) You are one of the users that seemingly was always in our chat, another of "the old crew". I'll never forget our fun banter, nor your stack exchange video.
Without detailing each one, many others I knew from chat:
Gwen, Scalia, Shady Puck someonewithpc, stacker TARDIS Maker, Thom Blair III, and Vader.

I leave this site with a word or two of advice.

Remember what it was like to be a noob, the things we take for granted, many reading your answers will not know.
Mind the tags. I was once called the tag master you will have to replace me for that job, please keep reign on those unwieldy categorizations.
2.8 brought a ton of new users and questions to this site (more then anything else in BSE's 6 years and 8 months history), you are going to have to find a way to filter out all the LQPs and keep the gems.
Mods: always stay pingable in the chat room, that is important.

Its been fun, disappointing, tiring, invigorating, draining, exciting, enlightening and so on. I would not trade my experiences here away. Were I able to go back these six years, sure there are some things I would of changed, but I'd do it all again.
Farewell all.

Thanks for being the mentor we needed around here. Hope I'll see you around again some day. PS: You should have posted this GIF https://media.giphy.com/media/gFwZfXIqD0eNW/giphy.gif

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos The difference is the terminator said "I'll be back" not so sure that is true of me.

One can hope for better stack exchange days :)

owwwwww, nooooooo

Live long and prosper!

Today is a sad day, you never read into these until it hits your site. The community is what makes any site and I hope SE realizes that one day before they lose the core of what built and maintained many of these communities.

Understandable. I never was very active anyway, even though I still have the reward T-Shirt. I have quit long ago over inter user quarrels and I still am on page one of the users. Something to think about. Big projects often forget that it's people who make the site big, not the software. Where can I read about the big problems?

Guess I found it. The more politically correct people want to be, the less correct they become.

@David, thank you for all you have done for this site and the network.  It's sad that it's ending like this, but we can only control our own actions.  Thank you for standing up for what you believe in.  I hope we meet again in a better place.

@MonicaCellio hold on while I pick up my jaw off the floor (yes seeing a comment from you was a huge surprise). wow How do you even find posts like these? You will forever have legend status for us network power users. Thank you for everything you have done. PS I hope you don't mind when I borrowed your avatar.

@David this post is linked from Meta; that's how I found it.  Thanks for the kind words.  I was touched by your change in name/gravatar!

I actually cried when I read this. You will be missed, and the site, will be so much less for it. I've always admired you incredible commitment to the duty of moderating this site. Thanks for keeping all things tidy as they should be :). I will miss your presence on chat immensely.

It is very sad to see how one known as always ready to help to the site goes away. I wish you keep only the best moments you had from SE and I only hope site continues working which will be harder without your invaluable contribution.

Sad to see you leave. Given the circumstance this is totally understandable. Hope we'll see you around in some other part of the Blender community!

Thankyou for the mention it is very humbling.  Thankyou for your advice, patience, diplomacy, statesmanship, responsiveness, understanding.  Will do my best to heed the advice re noobs and not put on my big bad wolf hat and... Hopefully you are not lost to blender and  without the "addiction" of BSE can get down and create away.  Oh and also may  you find something to fill the sweeping and hat fetish.  You will be sorely missed. Adios Amigo.

Thank you for the very kind words! I myself learned so much from your posts and the site you co-build. I too am using the site less and less, I barely visit twice a week now. Am also sickened what is happening with SE. I wish you the best in all the next endeavors David!

Thank you for your meticulous tag management.
Thank you for your tireless review queue sweeps.
Thank you for your steadfast flag handling.
You poured so much energy into keeping the cogs of this site going for years. We appreciate you for that. But more than that, thank you for being our friend. Your advice is well taken.
Thank you for everything, we'll miss you.


text:
A goodbye to the community - iKlsR Moderator Resignation
Most of you here probably don't know my handle or haven't interacted with me personally since I've taken a back seat for a while now. I was the very first moderator here and I'm very proud of that fact and what I've accomplished in my earlier years. This post is being done off the top of my head so forgive the absence of any links or accurate dates.
I can remember the exact summer 2013 where I finished packing and was literally about to head out the door when I got the email that Blender.SE was had left Area51 and was entering private beta. I was beyond excited since I was an avid user of the software so I cancelled my entire summer, created an account and began churning out answers. Not accounting for StackExchange employees I was the 8th user to sign up. Today we have almost 69k (nice) users at the time of this writing.
I was eager to contribute and racked up points quickly (back then it was extremely fun to watch your reputation grow) and got to 4k points where I unlocked some moderator privileges, later on I applied to be a community mod and then was eventually promoted to a full time moderator voted in by the community some years later.
We have 4 (2?) moderators now at the time of writing but I have worked alongside 4 separate others in the past. I also take great pride in knowing that I was instrumental in deciding the approach the community took on how to tighten our scope regarding questions and exercising my privileges to keep the site clean, promote it whenever and wherever I could including getting the creator of Blender to join and organizing several events in the past with notable famous artists in the community. There's a lot more I could drone on about but similar to others I have dedicated a significant amount of my somewhat younger years on this site (I was 19 when I joined).

Now enough of the history. If you care or know what has been happening in the past few months regarding SE you should understand why people are leaving. I won't repeat it or speak on it but if you're interested you can poke around. I'll just say that at the end of the day people just want to ask a question and get an answer and be on their way, nothing more. Anything else is a distraction and waste of my time and others.
To see how SE now treats their "valued" employees and people who have volunteered years of their life for pretty much nothing in return is discouraging to say the least. Therefore as of today I wrap up my involvement with StackExchange completely. I will no longer participate on any of the sites and will not be replying to any messages going forward. This is not me being vengeful, I'm literally just tired, in general... a break is needed.
Cheers and I wish the best for this community, will not forget the friends I've made along the way.
Quick facts

8th user to join
I've asked 0 questions
First user to unlock moderator privileges, first community moderator, longest serving moderator
— Some more I can't remember off the top of my head. :)

Just going to ride David's post silently today and vanish into the shadows. :D. Cheers all.

Wow something went seriously wrong here... I will miss you too!

It feels empty around here now, I can hear the eco of my typing. You guys were the oldest most knowledgeable mods. I'll do my best to fill in your shoes, but I don't feel like I'm up to it. We'll miss you

#BigSad #SadMess :( :( :(

That's the problem with volunteer work on a big site. We're all too small by now to get noticed. Whatever work we do, it basically evaporates, leaving nothing but less time to live. I mostly quit long ago.

Fellow old-timer here (I happen to be wearing my Blender.SE t-shirt today). We'll remember you. Best wishes: take care, and may you find what you're looking for.

Best of luck on your new path. I hope you'll find some project that treats you better and is fulfilling. If you're interested in still being part of the Blender community, there plenty of other places where your talents and effort would be greatly appreciated.

Goodbye and thankyou number 8.  Another achievement of yours David once mentioned: you were the last to sweep the meta review, when more categories were on offer.  Just checked the review and the sweepster himself still holds sway.  Sad times indeed.

Thanks iKlsR for all the amazing work you've put into the site, I wouldn't be where I am without this site as it was source of my knowledge long before I became user and decided to share back.

@MrZak lol I even never got the BSE swag, they forgot to send it to me twice and then I gave up :)

Wow.
From someone who was there when the site was just starting to walk (admittedly I arrived at bit late, 587 users after you), I can personally attest that its impossible to overstate the effort you've put into making this site live and breath.
I am surprised to learn you were that young. Your leadership and initiative was and is inspiring, and I don't think I'm alone in looking up to you. To me you are eternally the cool moderator who always knows what to do.
For some this site is just a helpful search result, for others this site has been a major part our lives. Either way, you made it all possible.
You should absolutely be proud of what you have built.
Thank you for bringing us all together.

I know you and Duarte are more than up to the task at hand which is what will make this transition fairly painless in exiting the community here. You've more than surpassed me now and I've learnt a lot from you guys as well. Will always remember the good times in the farm plus you know where to find us later on. Thanks and all the best oh wise one! :)

Knowing this was coming (us mods talked about all this) did not make reading your goodbye any easier. To quote you "SAD. Bigly disappointed".
The only consolation here is that I will no longer need an urban dictionary tab open when in chat. :)
BSE has lost a true friend. A steward of the first rate. Your dedication to this site at the start is what got BSE off the ground.
From all of us that have benefited, the thousands of users and the millions of others that have found answers here, Thank you. I personally would not know blender anywhere near as well as I do without this site.
If it were not for the great mods we leave behind I know the site would become a #mess without you.
I hope you can now take that vacation you canceled back in the summer of 2013.
I'll always remember you, and what you've done.
Go rek em m8.
PS feel free to swim over to our rock any time.


text:
Big thanks to the Blender.SE community!
Moderators, veterans and other mentors.
Before any more of you leave, you need to know:
YOU'RE AWESOME!
(it doesn't get said enough)
It's just amazing to be a part of such a great community.
Blender SE is the first site I check in the morning. And the last one I check before going to bed.
I learn so much here every day, I can hardly put it into words.
People here restored my faith in humanity.
And also, helped me to find a purpose (don't laugh, you'll hurt my ego).
So, mighty moderators and common folk :), veterans and newbies:

Thank you for helping others.
Thank you for being kind to people with silly questions.
Thank you for your infinite patience with me and other newbies.
Thank you for going out of your way to help solve somebody else's problems.
Thank you.

Duarte Farrajota Ramos - Man, I don't know how you do it. Every single day. Respect.
Cegaton - if you ever read this, just know that you left a mark. You're my hero.
Robert Gützkow - you really know Blender inside out. Damn.
Robin Betts - you always come up with even more elegant solution to any problem. Like, how?
gandalf - legendary. I read 600 of your answers so far. Took me 4 months. Worth it.
batFINGER - I don't speak Python, but now I really really want to.
(I just don't know where else to post this)
Still. Cegaton? Really?

Awww, thank you! I wouldn't say that I know Blender inside out, but I try my best. Blender's source code is simply too big to know everything. I love helping the community and I'm very glad that my contributions have made a positive impact, even if it's just a little bit.

I'm so glad the message got across :). I certainly benefit a lot from all your answers (old and new) and wish there were more people like you on the web :).

@ᴊᴀᴄʜʏᴍᴍɪᴄʜᴀʟ thanks for this. I'll let cegaton know about this post. I hope BSE stays strong in spite of our departure. Kind of sad that this kind of thing is the only time we all think to say thank you.

@David Thanks for passing it along. I had this post in my head for a few weeks, but decided to hurry up :). You never heard of me, but your extensive Q&A posts are of great help anytime I'm lost. Enjoy your retirement, and make sure to check on us every once in a while :).


text:
An argument for allowing the 2.8 tag
I've been using SE for years now. As a long-term user, I always try to search for existing questions instead of immediately asking a new one, as is expected.
Now that I'm learning Blender 2.8, I find it very difficult to find questions that are relevant because the majority of relevant answers are for 2.7 and before. As a simple example, when searching vertex weights, the first 5 answers are for the older version before I get a relevant answer for 2.8. However, if I were allowed to specify with a tag: [2.8] vertex weights, I would only get answers for the version I'm looking for. That's the point of having tags, correct? After all, tags are defined as:

"Tags are used to categorize questions so that it's easier to search or browse through all the questions on the website"

I'm not advocating for small incremental tags for every minor release. I'm not asking for tags for 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3... that would be cumbersome and inefficient, as mentioned before. However, the difference in the software between pre- and post-2.8 is extensive. The new version is an entire new monster, and the answers that applied to one version no longer apply to the other.
StackExchange allows a distinction between windows-7 and windows-10. Why can't we? I hope the phrase "version tag" doesn't automatically get shut down without consideration. I know this has been discussed before, but these discussions took place before the program experienced such a radical update. As you can see here, the accepted answer of not allowing 2.8 tag has been gradually losing traction now that 2.8 is in its stable release.

https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=2.8+tags

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Not sure what the link to those search results is supposed to mean. Out of those 9 results, only 3 are relevant questions on the matter (the rest are answers), and I purposely discussed and linked to each one of those 3 in my question above. To reiterate my concern: "I hope the phrase 'version tag' doesn't automatically get shut down without consideration."

Just pointing out that it has been discussed several times already with no conclusive decision so far, veering towards not having that tag

Correction: "the answers that applied to one version sometimes no longer apply to the other".

I agree with you, lets do it.
The main arguments I'm aware of against having a version tags are:

It's messy. Almost every question on the site is eligible for one of these tags.

Yes, perhaps having the same tag on nearly every question from now until 2.9 releases sometime in 2 or 4 years seems silly, but I think the improved search-ability is worth it. Tags are used for SEO, so there's a good chance it'd benefit outside searchers as well as power users searching on SE.

It invites "tagging the answer"; answers should be updated to be version agnostic anyway.

It may be unrealistic to expect to re-tag all our existing questions overnight, but as we've definitely learned by now, updating every 2.7 specific answer to have a 2.8 section also isn't happening any time soon. Version tagging definitely sounds like more realistic way to handle this kind of transition.

Before we eagerly start creating tags and editing, we should discuss convention once again.
Some ideas:

2.8 Very short and clean, but leaves room for users to assume there are/should be 2.81 2.82 tags as well. Also not necessarily obvious it is referring to blender's version number.
2.7x Unambiguously about all versions from 2.70 to 2.79. Fairly clearly a version tag given the context (the description can help) but not totally unambiguous in that respect.
v2.4x Messy and unsightly, but most definitely a version tag.
blender-2.3x Clearly a blender version tag, but long (considering this tag will likely be added to so many questions and will be sorted first a lot of the time, shortness is probably a virtue worth prioritizing).

Personally I'm inclined to go with 2.2x but I'd like to have some consensus before charging ahead.

Here I would like to say that 2.8 would be the best as now most questions are being asked with this version,  the largest changes were made with 2.8 and 2.79 is vastly different from 2.8.

I wonder if using something like 2.8* or 2.8# would help search engines understand the version semantics would cover all 2.81 , 2.82 etc.

Is it really helpful to differentiate between 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7? See my answer for further explanation.

As @RayMairlot said, I don't think we should go back and start categorizing previous versions with 2.7, 2.6, 2.5, ... that sounds like a burdensome task that nobody would want to take on, and it might change expected search results. I was suggesting a simple 2.8 from now onward to filter out "old" answers. This would give us just two easy categories: [2.8] and [everything else as it always was].

@Marquizzo I could get behind only having a 2.8 tag (though I still think that will encourage users to create their own tags if they're using other versions of blender) but I would still like to emphasise that there are plenty of pre 2.8 answers that it would be disadvantageous to filter out because they would answer the question.

Something like 2.8x or 1.x or 2.82x (for a, b, c) is common parlance for version releases. I would be more comfortable with that, since it follows the standards that everyone else does.

The purpose of a version tag may be to help with searching, but I think one of the downsides is that this will filter out perfectly good answers. If someone is using 2.6, but doesn't see any results for a specific query with that tag, they may presume their question hasn't been asked and either ask their question or leave the site, but the question may have been asked and answered, but tagged 2.7.
Will this help new users or limit them? Will they know that questions tagged 2.5 and 2.7 will be just as suitable to them or presume that because there are version tags that there are major differences between those versions? Will we get a mass of duplicate questions because people presume that other questions aren't applicable to them even though they are?
So, ok, we limit the tags to:

2.4 era
2.5 - 2.7 era
2.8+ era

But how do we do that? We either have tags that are unnecessary (2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 will all refer to the same 'era') or... what? A convoluted 2.5-2.7 tag? And as gandalf3 pointed out, how do we make tags unambiguous enough that users aren't constantly making new version tags?
While there are plenty plenty of 2.8 specific questions, there are also plenty that refer to more general topics that have been already answered or answers that contain instructions for 2.79 and 2.8.
I'm not completely against this, but I'm also not entirely convinced that this will be as useful as people think.

Maybe tag synonyms could be used to enforce only 2.4 , 2.5 and 2.8 tags, though it will still certainly confuse users trying to tag questions

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Synonyms could be the answer, but seeing '2.5' when looking for '2.7' would definitely confuse people.

It probably would. We´d have to resort to those "ugly" 2.5-2.61 (I think its when Cycles was introduced) style tags. May be your three categories are enough pre 2.4 era, 2.5 to 2.79 and 2.8*

My original thought was to simply allow the 2.8 tag, not to introduce a comprehensive tagging system for previous versions. That way if you search with no version tags as usual, you'll get all results as usual (so as to not change behavior or expectations), but if you specify [2.8], then you'll get more tailored results. Nobody is going to go back and organize thousands of pre-2.8 questions.

Let's just add 2.8, please.


text:
I would like to post my blender when I have issue, what are people using to post?
I have been a bit of nightmare with doing normal bakes recently, and it's time that i start posting my blend. Currently each time i try to bake, only the head of my female shows up baked in the normal map, the rest of the file is filled with various colors that do not conform to the uvmap I unwrapped. Since I'm at work, i won't be able to post until later, but people use google drive, dropbox, etc or what else?

https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/


text:
Should the 'sapling-addon' tag be renamed?
I've just noticed the sapling-addon tag.

This tag seems to be the odd one out compared to other add-on tags in that it has 'addon' in the tag name whereas thers don't (fspy, animation-nodes, sverchok).
The official name of the add-on seems to be 'Sapling Tree Gen'.

I propose we rename the tag to sapling-tree-gen.

For consistency sake I agree, sapling-tree-gen seems like a better name. I actually wouldn't mind seeing all addon related tags have the "addon" word in them for search and aggregation purposes, though I do see how it would get unwieldy and cumbersome

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Yeah, I don't mind either way as long as it's consistent.

For now I think you can go ahead and rename it to [sapling-tree-gen], the other one seems more disruptive and would probably take a lot of work to retag

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I thought moderators had the ability to rename tags (I don't) without having to re-tag? https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87437/how-to-rename-a-tag

Indeed, thanks for the link. Wasn't aware of that, learned something new. You'd make a fine moderator ;)

Either way if we are going to rename things I'd go with a better name structure and rename all addon tags with "addon" prefix, and all render engine tags with "render-engine" prefix. We need some consensus here, what are your thoughts?


text:
What can we do to reduce the misuse of the 'blender-render' tag?
In my opinion the blender-render tag has become problematic.
This tag has become (or always has been) one of the most misused tags we have. People are adding this tag to new questions simply because it mentions rendering and not because it relates to the actual render engine. I have this as one of my watched tags so I edit the tag out as the questions come in or leave a comment when it is unclear, but it is being misused nearly every day and sometimes more:
(Note: These are just my edits of the tag, I don't know if there are more by other users.)
Feb 2nd:

Is it possible to convert any mp4 file to hdri format to use in blender background
problem with insetting faces

Feb 3rd:

Grease Pencil Crash when Draw
Transparent background not working with smoke domain

Feb 4th:

Rendering from command line script that allows specifying which camera to use / render with
Nodes, undesired pixel/glitch effect

Feb 5th:

Why does my render layer node not have the expected number of outputs?
Missing elements while rendering an image in Blender

Feb 7th:

Strange lightning - what is wrong with my model?

Feb 9th:

Rendering Black Screen

Feb 10th:

Blacklight CFL Bulb Effect?

Feb 11th:

Blender 2.81a cannot render anything
Blender crashing [Update on my old post] (came in as I was writing this)

The tag was actually renamed from blender-internal to blender-render because originally it was being misused. You can see the discussion here. I don't know how badly it was being misused at the time, but it's pretty bad at the minute. It was brought up at the time (in the comments, by David) that this could turn out to be a problem, and I think I can safely say that it has.
I don't entirely know what the solution is - whether changing it back to 'blender-internal' would at least reduce incorrect tagging, I don't know. I don't entirely like this option as the official name is 'Blender-Render', but I don't know what it could be renamed to. Even if we decided that this is a special case where it should have 'engine' in the tag (blender-render-engine), new users would probably still misuse it, thinking it refers to all render engines in Blender.
Regardless, I think we need to discuss what could be done to reduce its misuse.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that the name uses very generic and common terms, like "Blender" and "Render". Bewildered new users often resort that tag when they know no better. Sacrificing accuracy and naming it something like [internal-render] or [internal-render-engine] would probably help reduce false positives by making the tag suggestion pop up less often.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I have a slight preference for 'blender-internal' because that is at least it's unofficial name (again, I don't know quite how badly it was being misused originally, but it's hard to imagine it was worse than this).

I wonder if you should somehow enforce some form of categorization into our tag names. Something like [render-engine-internal], [render-engine-cycles] [render-engine-EEVEE], [render-engine-luxender] and expando to other areas like [addon-sapling-tree], [addon-animation-nodes], [addon-tissue]. It'd probably help this issue considerably

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I definitely agree that we should have a standard format (in the form of an answer on the relevant meta questions, which can serve as a reference for new tags). I would probably suggest having either render-engine and add-on as a suffix though, simply because it's slightly more readable. Or is there some use to having it as a prefix?

I suggested a prefix for sorting purposes, when browsing or listing related tags would be bundled together. Downside is of course readability. In terms of search suggestion it seems to make no difference, the engine seems to support fuzzy search and non contiguous matches

Do you think that will be something that will need to be done though? Trying to think of times when that will be of benefit and whether that number is great enough to sacrifice readability.

"Addon" seems to be a recognized word, I'd ditch the hyphen. Could we somehow shorten also "render-engine"?

My main concern was search suggestion, but given how the engine is relatively intelligent suffixes should be fine

'addon' was renamed to 'add-on' (at my suggestion) because that is the term officially used in Blender. This was unfortunately done through chat a few years ago, so no reference to it on meta.

For readability sake I'd go with just "addon" at least for these just to avoid overly long tags.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

As part of the 'Revamping tags 2020' process (partially motivated by this question) the blender-render tag has been renamed to blender-internal-render-engine.
This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the misuse of the tag. While it hasn't completely eradicated it, there have only been 5 misuses of the tag* in the week since it has been renamed vs 11 misuses (listed in the question) over the same amount of time prior to renaming.

*I'm only aware of the questions that I retagged - other users might have also retagged questions.


text:
How can I search for questions?
I'm brand new to the Blender Stack Exchange and relatively new to using Blender.
My first question is in regards to using the Stack Exchange itself. How can I search for questions so I don't have to post a new question if the answer I'm looking for is already answered?
I don't see a "Search" input anywhere.

Welcome! (1) See the top bar. (2) You have to download 2.82 from here: https://builder.blender.org/download/, Also see the release notes: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.82/Physics

Thanks to both of you. After down;oading 2.8.2 I now seem to have Mantaflow installed! I couldn't post this on the meta section originally due to being a first time poster. Thanks agian!

Glad we could help. Consider to accept Duartes answer: https://blender.stackexchange.com/tour

Builtin search is in the black header top bar above
While search can be done on site the builtin search engine, the results are not always the the best. It can't ignore typos, find synonyms nor similar terms.
Google is a good alternative. You can narrow down searching to this site using the filter site:blender.stackexchange.com like
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:blender.stackexchange.com

Thank you Duarte! I didn't see the top black header as it kind of blends into the Google search bar. I will use this in future. I did realize that this question should have been posted in the "meta" section, but I didn't think I could post it there as there was a message saying that I needed to have a reputation of "5", and I didn't think I had any reputation as I'd never been to this site before. I'm still fumbling my way around, but hopefully I'll get the hang of it.


text:
Revamping tags 2020
Given the recent concerns raised about misuse of tags and incoherent naming of addons this is a tentative proposal to generally improve tag names in Blender Stack Exchange, and bring about some order and categorization.
The underlying idea is to rename existing tags and add either common prefixes or suffixes so related terms are aggregated and grouped together.
These add missing structure by providing semantics, so similar tags look related, they would visually appear more alike, and users will see suggested related terms in the autocomplete popup when typing some tags.
Some concerns have been raised about readability and whether we should use prefixes or suffixes.
Prefixes have the advantage of affecting sorting order, also when listing stuff together having a common first part makes them look visually related, sort together and easier to follow; where suffixes don't.
The tag search engine does supports fuzzy searching and non-contiguous matches however, so it shouldn't have a severe effect. I don't have a strong opinion here both would work fine.
I'd rather have shorter, rather than longer tag names, but I feel the added structure is worth the trade-off.
Pros:

Semantic relationship between tags
Similar tags are grouped together
Hopefully reduces misuse of ambiguous tags like blender-render
Increased chance users find appropriate tags

Cons:

Longer tags names
Potentially worse readability
Some added maintenance work
Dubious real benefit to users

Render Engines
All render engine related tags should receive a render-engine prefix

render-engine-blender-internal synonym  render-engine-blender-render (should reduce misuse of tag)
render-engine-cycles
render-engine-eevee
render-engine-workbench
render-engine-luxrender
render-engine-renderman
...

Addons
Addons would receive similar treatment. Tagging a question add-on would make all specific addons pop up in suggestions, increasing the likelyhood of users finding the correct tags. For brevity I'd stick to "addon" rather than the official "add-on".

addon-animation-nodes
addon-spaling-tree-gen
addon-sverchok
addon-blend4web
addon-node-wrangler
...

We could later expand to more areas like modifiers or nodes if we deem necessary

modifier-data-transfer
modifier-mesh-cache
modifier-mesh-sequence-cache
modifier-normal-edit
modifier-uv-project
modifier-uv-warp
modifier-vertex-weight-edit
modifier-vertex-weight-mix
modifier-vertex-weight-proximity
modifier-weighted-normal
modifier-array
modifier-bevel
modifier-boolean
modifier-build
modifier-decimate
modifier-edge-split
modifier-mask
modifier-mirror
modifier-multiresolution
modifier-remesh
modifier-screw
modifier-skin
modifier-solidify
modifier-subdivision-surface
modifier-triangulate
modifier-weld
modifier-wireframe
modifier-armature
modifier-cast
modifier-corrective-smooth
modifier-curve
modifier-displace
modifier-hook
modifier-laplacian-smooth
modifier-laplacian-deform
modifier-lattice
modifier-mesh-deform
modifier-shrinkwrap
modifier-simple-deform
modifier-smooth
modifier-surface-deform
modifier-warp
modifier-wave
modifier-explode
modifier-ocean
modifier-particle-instance

What do you guys think, is this worth the trouble? Any better naming schemes or different ideas?

Render Engines:
The renaming of the render engine tags is mainly related to reducing the misuse of the rather generically named blender-render tag. Whether all the other render engine tags need renaming because of this, I don't know. I'm certainly not against having all the tags be consistent, but if there's no ambiguity with the other tags, then maybe they don't need renaming and only the blender-render tag needs to be looked at (whether that's adding 'render-engine' to the tag or something else). I think this is my general opinion of the other tag categories as well.
Add-ons:
Again, I am pro-consistency, but at the minute it's only the sapling-addon that is the odd one out of the add-on tags and most of the add-on names are unique enough that they are not being confused with other tags very often. Maybe it will become an issue if there are more generically named add-ons in future.
(If we do go ahead of this I'm still not particularly convinced that it's worth saving a single character by omitting the '-' from 'add-ons', but I don't ultimately mind.)
Modifiers:
There is a lack of consistency here. For example, some tags have modifier in the name (screw-modifier and build-modifier) and some don't. 'build' would certainly be ambiguous without 'modifier' in the name. I actually think this makes the modifier tags the best use case for being consistently renamed.
However, there are some tags which relate to more than just the modifier, e.g. the mirror tag relates to all types of mirroring, not just the modifier. Same with bevel. In these instances will there be a mirror tag in addition to a mirror-modifier tag?
Prefixes vs Suffixes
I still don't understand the advantages you have put forward for prefixes vs the disadvantage of readability. What are the actual usage examples of prefixes helping with sorting order? What example of using the site will lead to it being useful to have tags listed together? I get that prefixes do make tags look visually related and it would make similar tags be sorted together, and it certainly looks neat, but when specifically will this be useful?
TLDR
To sum up, I think:

Modifiers are the best use-case for having a suffix and it is less necessary for other tags. Other categories just need the odd tag fixed.
Tags in a specific category should be consistent. If some tags in a specific category have a suffix, they all should.
We should have suffixes as opposed to prefixes if it is decided tags need them.

"In these instances will there be a mirror tag in addition to a mirror-modifier tag?" Yes in this case I'd say we would have two tags, one specifically for the modifier, one for the Edit Mode operator. One other example would be the Boolean Modifier vs the recently added Edit Mode Boolean Operations

"I get that prefixes do make tags look visually related and it would make similar tags be sorted together, and it certainly looks neat, but when specifically will this be useful?" That it, it is mostly a visual thing, they look better and more consistent. They would also sort together at https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags or when typing in the tag field, rather than be scattered alphabetically. Again it is a minor thing I'm good either way

Well, I disagree that 'looking better' is a good enough reason to go this route. And I also disagree that having tags sort when typing in the tag field is practically useful. If a user types 'render' why is it useful to have the tags grouped together? I mean, again, I get that it does it (although only some of the render tags appear when typing 'render'), but I still don't understand the specific use case? But I guess it doesn't matter as you went ahead with it anyway.

Other than sorting and visual appearance I don't think is a clear winner or advantage of prefixes over suffixes. Either way practically for end users it all ends up seeming ultimately indifferent, since we have synonyms setup. Nothing is written in stone, we can always change them back or rename them again it if we find it somehow harmful anyway

I really don't think that for end users there isn't any difference. Having seen the tags in action it only enforces my thoughts about readability. Personally, I can no longer look at tags at a glance, I have to read past the prefix to get to the actual information in the tag. For me this prioritises appearance over readability.

Switched to suffixes, we loose some visual coherence, but it does gain in readability


text:
Community Promotion Ads — 2020
2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of Community Promotion Ads!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

interesting Blender addons, tutorials, and other resources
relevant events, conferences, or meetups
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.

Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

It's been a while that the following posts have more than 6 upvotes but I have never seen them being shown on the homepage. Why is that?

Just double checked on an incognito window, and can see these — try here, @Amir (that special link forces one of these ads to be displayed).

Interesting/weird, I still don't see any of the ads using that special link even in an incognito window.

Is it possible there's some addon on your browser blockin' 'em?

Yes I think the browser (FireFox) is blocking the ads somehow but I'm pretty sure I haven't done anything to block ads. I tried with another Browser (Chrome) and it worked.

A week back I tested it in a fresh install of Firefox and was able to see 'em, but my regular FF install is also blocking 'em somehow (I can't pinpoint how, though).

@JNat Community Promotion Ads display as normal, but Google's JavaScript is disabled so the “force show community ads” link actually results in no community ads at all.

Sorry, @wizzwizz4, what is this “force show community ads” link? I feel I'm missing something here :)

copied from 2019


text:
Flag declined on "not an answer"
I flagged an answer as "not an answer"
Why isn't the animated object moving in the final video?
That answer is OP trying to add an edit to the question, why was the flag denied?

thanks, converted to edit

I’m voting to close this question because it no longer up to date.


text:
Create tag(s) for questions that cover very narrow or specific problems
This is a suggestion to create one tag (or more if need be) for questions that are about very specific problems or techniques. It would allow to distinguish them from questions that cover more generic blender topics, ones that would benefit broader situations and user base.
For example:

How do I create a Drag Strip Material? or
How to do a seatbelt as part of my scene

Though one could learn many things from good answers, it would pretty much only help these guys specific problems.
On the contrary, Hair coming through the mesh? is a fairly generic issue, answer to which can benefit many people about how particles and meshes behave in Blender.
I couldn't find any existing tag that would allow that. Maybe selfishly, I'd sometimes rather browse and try to answer broader questions that benefit more people instead of problem specific ones.
Here are a few tag name ideas:

[problem-specific]
[how-to-do-this]
[dis-n-dat]

Here are additional example questions that would qualify for this tag:

Rigging telescopic pistons
How to make this petal shape a mesh?
Spheres colored in models image texture
Is there any way to rig Tinkercad models in Blender?

Some more example of questions that would NOT qualify for this new tag:

How To Spiralize Mesh
Darken a shadow on a shadow catcher without changing the light on the object casting it? (Blender Cycles 2.81)
Fast way of creating a total union of two objects

What do you think? Any tag name suggestions?

Oh and I forgot one requirement: avoid adding too much headache for moderators

Technically many of those questions would possibly not even be on topic to the site. The goal of the network is more to create a high quality database that can help anyone, rather than a one-on-one personal assistance to individuals

That's pretty much my point... But I agree with Ray's comment that it also brings some good ideas to the table sometimes. Thus the dilemma and the idea of using tags to filter them in or out.

I don't think this is a good idea.
Firstly, these are considered 'meta-tags' because they do not describe the actual content of the question. From the tagging section of the Help Center:

Avoid meta-tags
Do not use
  meta-tags
  in questions. Here are some tips to help you determine whether a tag
  is a meta-tag:

If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more
  or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner],
  [subjective], and [best-practices], are not helpful by themselves
  – they do not communicate anything about the content of the question.
If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. For example, the meaning of the tag
  [subjective] is, itself, subjective; the same is true for tags like
  [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by
  what criteria? Use only tags that have a broadly accepted, objective
  definition.

The important sentence from above is:

If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.

This is true of the specific tags you have suggested and the general idea behind them. problem-specific doesn't tell us a single thing about what the question is about.
Secondly, as someone who does a lot of re-tagging and has recently been involved in discussions about the prevention of misusing tags I can pretty safely say that, at least from the tags you have suggested, people would use these generic types of tags on nearly every question asked, regardless of relevance.

"I have a problem, I'll use the problem-specific tag!"
"I want to know how to do something, I'll use the how-to-do-this tag!"

This would require a lot of work to re-tag questions correctly, which we already do a lot of. Aside from that, I think it could be subjective as to what is a specific problem and what counts as a more general problem.
I appreciate those tags were just suggestions, but I don't think you could come up with something that wouldn't be misused, simply because their intention is to be quite general.
To summarise:

These are against the Help Center recommendations.
In my opinion these tags are subjective.
They would probably be heavily misused.

All valid points. Thanks for all the pointers btw. Those are definitely metatags so I see your point against that... Now with regard to the two other points of your summary: what if these tags could only be added by moderators? That would reduce subjectivity and misuse.  It opens up the idea that some questions are closed/flag for being too broad or for subjective, so why not then flag/close questions that are too specific?

If tags could only be added by moderators then that would simply increase the work for moderators. More importantly, that isn't possible. It also wouldn't reduce subjectivity, it would just change who is in charge of the subjectivity. We do flag and close for being too specific it's just that there some incredibly creative answers have come out of asking specific question so we tend to err on the side of caution.

Also, I do think there are a lot of questions that are too specific and should be closed. We could come down a bit heavier on specific questions - often they have other issues as well and are closed anyway - but unfortunately we get a lot of questions that I view as too specific and we would end up closing an awful lot. A lot of modelling questions are very specific for example. Maybe that should happen maybe not.

... that is the question...  :) thanks Ray!


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Is Blend-Exchange still active and operational?
I installed via Tampermonkey and TM says it has access to the site (Blender Stack Exchange).  However, there is no button above this question's formatting buttons.

If Blend-Exchange isn't the preferred method of hosting .blends, what is?

Why don't you go to blend-exchange and try it manually? Other than that, this might be a topic for meta.

Blend file hosting provided by Blend Exchange is a third party courtesy of GiantCowFilms, not officially part of Stack Exchange as far as I know. It was recently rewritten from the ground up and completely revamped. The script was probably not updated to the current version, as such it is likely outdated.

The extension should be working, the latest version ([2.02]

The extension should be working, the latest version (2.02) appears properly for me. Note that it currently doesn't support unposted questions, as blend-exchange requires the question URL and the extension can't know that until after the question has been posted. So unfortunately for now you'll just have to post your question and then edit to upload a .blend.


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This question already exists
Read this first.
So I came to this point where I had enough and came to figure things out here. I've been using this site for almost a month, but recently I started getting pressure from this one mod. Today is the day, when my post got deleted for the second time, not the same question, but a different one. Apparently, it is a "duplicate" question. The post was hidden and I was provided with those duplicate questions, one was already researched before and it didn't work, the other one was obsolete so it didn't work too.
I always try to figure things on my own before I ask my teacher, just like here. But when you can't, you just ask. But things here seem different, though not sure yet. I posted a new question, providing even more details, like the protruding ring lines in the picture, which wasn't shown the first time. It's hidden again, because duplication. Well, how do you ask otherwise when those other peoples' problems are similar, but I have different outcomes and their provided solutions doesn't solve mine?

This is what should be at least fixed, if the moderator is proved to be not guilty. "If this question doesn't resolve your question, ask a new one." OK, the text obviously means that if the provided questions by the moderator doesn't resolve my problem, I should ask a new one again (at least, that's how most people understand). And like I said before, I did ask a new one, it got hidden, then I edited it, evaluating the mod's work. If it's a duplicate, then provide how is it the same, give proof not just "I pressed a couple of buttons, read this question and figure it yourself." I have never experienced this kind of situation, although I ask a lot when there's no other way, that's called activity, but here it's seems the opposite of it.

Again, as I stated in my first comment in your duplicate question and I quote: "If you feel your question was incorrectly closed as duplicate please edit it, providing additional information on the steps you took and why they didn't solve your problem so it can be reopened." Editing it will bump it up the question queue making it more visible again, will notify users it was edited after being closed, and will place it in a review queue so we can take a look at it.

Also take a look at https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates especially the last lines. Getting questions closed for being duplicates is quite common and there is nothing wrong with it except for frequent offenders or blatant duplicates. What is at fault here is your disproportionate reaction and generally offensive attitude towards others. If you keep that up other measures will be taken

nope, it says "Your post has been associated with similar questions. If these questions don’t resolve your question, ask a new one."

you're failing dude, just admit it.

@Duarte My only duplicate on a sibling site doesn't show that message. Would it be possible to contact someone to fix it? Asking a wrongly-duped question again does not make any sense to me.

@Leander I've added some related links in my answer.

Thanks Ray. So the question that remains is why is the OP seeing the notice encouraging to ask a new question rather than the one asking to edit it?

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos The answer here shows status-declined and Shog9's comment below it explains why. So maybe as you closed it without letting it go to a general vote (I don't know if you can do a 'regular' vote as a moderator) it didn't trigger the 'edit' suggestion.

"I don't know if you can do a 'regular' vote as a moderator" You can't unfortunately, mod votes are always binding, hence why I sometimes refrain from close voting questions. It may also be that since the duplicate is just the identical question from the same user and has no answers (accepted or otherwise), the message differs from normal.

I understand you want to get this sorted and you're probably frustrated with this process.

The message you are seeing on your question is slightly misleading and I understand why you asked the question again.
A closed question is not hidden from anyone and it can be voted to be reopened by users who have enough reputation (not just moderators).
Drop the petty comments. They just wont get you anywhere and will make people less likely to want to help you. No one is 'guilty' or 'failing'.

I don't know if the message you're seeing on your question suggesting you ask the question again has always been like that or whether it's changed recently, but it does seem misleading. What Duarte is suggesting is correct and what we advise anyone to do when a question has been closed and they feel it shouldn't have been: edit it and explain why the answers in the duplicate don't help or why your question is different. Once edited your question will enter the review queue and if the edits clearly (and calmly) explain why the duplicate question isn't a duplicate, people will vote for it to be reopened.
To summarise:

I understand the message you're seeing is different from what Duarte suggested, but he is correct. And he has, in my opinion, dealt with this correctly, despite your comments towards him.
To proceed, use the 'edit' link below the question you want reopened to add information explaining how it's not a duplicate or how the answers don't help.
Threats or rudeness aimed at any user will not be tolerated.

This post goes over this quite thoroughly:
Someone flagged my question as already answered, but it's not

Some other related posts (slightly unclear which posts relate to how the site currently works):

"Please ask a new question" encourages question repetition for duplicates
Duplicate explanation should encourage improvement of original
How could we improve our planned post notice improvements?
New Post Notices rollout on Stack Overflow

slightly misleading..? This "slightly" misleading is the main reason it causes confusion, I don't know if the mods can write those private feedbacks or they are automated messages, but damn, fix it or something. It's like if I was working a sorter job where the rule is to sort plastic bottles to the plastic bin only, but then I get a message from my boss saying, that there's going to be an accidental glass bottle coming up on the conveyor belt and gave me an order to throw that into plastic bin. You'd be confused, whether you should follow the rules or listen to boss. Same happens here.


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How come nobody answers my questions?
I have asked numerous questions on this forum and almost none have been. I’ve never been this ignored on any other forum ever?! What do I have to get attention, and answers.

for example you ask in one of your questions if you can add an IK to an armature, but your question is much too vague, yes you can add an IK to any armature, but in that precise case, where are you trying to add an IK, what to do, etc... plus it looks like it's an imported armature, not sure it's very controllable...

maybe not enough people to answer ? / or the question is not clear ? / or too complicated ? you have another big blender website where you can ask your questions: https://blenderartists.org/c/support/9/l/new

Most of your question is not well structured to make people understand your question in a quick glance. Too much question mark, not sure what are you asking for, and those topics are hard to answer IMO. Try to add figure to show your problem and use markdown to format your question, then we can talk about those vague topic

Also, there is only 2,000 people own 200+ reputation on this website. And maybe half of them ask a question and gain a lot of reputation while never using this website since the first post. This forum might not be that popular compare to Blender Artists and other forum maybe.

also since this is not a question about using blender it fits better in the [meta]. Also check  [ask] to figure out how to improve your questions.

What should I do if no one answers my question?

Thanks for the feed back.

I will go through some questions and add some feedback. If you actually care about this site you will update them and make them be a good contribution.

I always sound very rude, because of my flavourless descriptive tone. Sorry about that. But ask yourself the following question. If you haven't fixed all of your previous questions yet (it's been 10 days) and improved them, how do expect other users to give their free time and not only help you, but a large number of other people on this site?

I was under the idea that this website was a simple forum. If this is anything more than that, then maybe I should look somewhere else.

This site works a bit different than most: is a questions and answers site,  it is not a forum or social media. At the bottom of the page in the regular site there is a link that reads "tour" click on it to understand how the site works.


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Should duplicate and paid add-on tags be kept or removed?
While reading through questions, I realized that there are a great number of tags that seem to be either duplicated or otherwise very sparsely used or just misused frequently.
Would it be useful to either consolidate or remove some of these? It might make edits and asking a bit simpler, but I would be interested to hear feedback.The list of tags is below.

auto-rig-pro
select
bytes
archipack-add-on
addon not add-on
alpha not alpha-channel
blender-internal andinternal-renderandblender-internal-render and blender-render and render-engine-blender-internal NOT blender-internal-render-engine (or something, this one is maybe a little confusing, although with 2.8 soon a non-issue I guess)
eevee and render-engine-eevee NOT eevee-render-engine
fcurve NOT fcurves
luxrender and render-engine-luxrender NOT luxrender-render-engine
math andmaths NOT mathematics
modelling NOT modeling
renderman andrender-engine-renderman NOT renderman-render-engine
sss NOT subsurface-scattering

A lot of those are synonyms and not duplicates. They redirect to the 'primary' tag. Bytes was created by a new user, removed by me, and will automatically be deleted soon. There are also discussions here and here about tags.

Hi Timaroberts, thanks for the investigation. Like Ray said most of those are already synonyms if you follow the links they'll take you to the correct targets. The ones that aren't were possibly overlooked and will be merged

I guess I had assumed that they were just duplicated, especially with all of the BI tags :) thanks for the clarification!

BSE tag synonyms

@David thanks! I didn't know that page existed :)


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Should we have pixel-art tag?
I've created it, but @RayMairlot expressed doubt that there is enough questions to warrant it.
I think it's needed because it is a unique art style that requires specific settings and unique compositing setups as it's partially opposite to goals of approximately half of renderings, realism, and is different from cartoon renders too. I've started working on pixel art in Blender to help filling a new tileset for Cataclysm DDA game and there is at least two other artists in the chat of only that small project who were excited to learn that Blender is partially feasible for pixel art because they can work in Blender too, not counting likes on the forum.
I've also published my setup at https://github.com/int-ua/blender-pixelart if you would like to learn more and maybe help.
Edit
List of questions that I think are relevant:
Any workflow recommendation for 2.5-D pixel art style?
Pixelate the viewport camera in Eevee for previewing live pixel art / low-resolution render?
Is there a way to force pixellate the viewport render?
How to not distort pixels?
Pixelart style render in blender
Rendering a pixelated image
Freestyle without anti aliasing for pixel art (2.8)
How do I generate pixel-art friendly UV maps?
Pixelate Node: Scaling Produces Missing Pixels On Border
How can I render pixel art images with no AA and transparent background?
How to render small object, as pixel art, without losing any of the pixels (Cycles render)?
Creating 3D pixel modeling?
How to disable anti-aliasing in the background images
How to generate a fake hand painted texture (Blizzard like), Borderlands effect or Pixel Art effect
How can I keep low resolution textures pixelated?
How to render a model with pixel art/sprite textures and have it not be blurry? (duplicate of the previous one)
Can't crop image's size in Blender 2.8
... I'm tired of this, maybe I'll continue the list later

I am not a moderator, but I try to keep on top of new tag creation to try and keep the number of tags ordered and manageable.
I am generally of the opinion that it's only worth creating a tag when there are a 'good enough' number of questions about the topic that may need the new tag. For example, if there was only 1 question that could benefit from a new tag, I would say that the tag is not necessary. So how many questions does it take before a tag might be useful? 15? 20? This is what I don't know. If there were 20 I would certainly start to think that a tag could be useful.
Regarding the pixel-art tag, while I am not wholly against it, I searched for "pixel art" and "pixelart" and it seems there's around 10 questions on the site about pixel art. I am unsure whether this is a big enough amount of questions to warrant the new tag.
However, it may be that I need to change my way of thinking about tags. The Stackoverflow Meta question, 'When is it appropriate to create a new?' tag says:

If you have enough reputation to create the tag, and if you think
there is a clear need for a tag, go ahead and create it yourself.
Uncommon topics are perfectly valid for a tag, as long as they're
still clearly defined.

But the comments on that question seem to throw into doubt what "clear need" actually means.
The help centre says:

When should I create new tags?
Most common tags already exist on a mature site. You should always
favor existing tags; only create new tags when you feel you can make a
strong case that your question does cover a new topic that nobody else
has asked about before on this site.

After reading these pages, I am inclined to say the new tag should exist and I shouldn't be basing it on numbers.
I am interested to hear what other people say. If others are fine with tags being created for a small number of questions (as long as the new tag is for a distinct topic, which pixel art is), then maybe I should be too.

Thank you! I'll try gathering the questions I consider relevant in a separate answer to discuss them briefly maybe.

@int_ua If you're going to add them I would maybe add them to your question.

There are currently 44 questions containing the phrase "pixel art", 24 of which have accepted answers, though 10 have no answers. I think this indicates enough interest to justify the tag. We currently have 72 tags which have fewer than 44 questions. Some of those tags may be of questionable value admittedly, but certainly not all (e.g. blend-modes).
Welcome pixel-art!

There is a difference between search results that match pixel art and questions that are about pixel art, but just mention it in passing.

For example this seems like a regular texturing question.

There does seem to be a surprising amount of questions about it, by the numbers alone it would indeed seem to warrant the tag existence. My questions is mostly about its actual usefulness, tagging a question "pixel-art" tells us very little about its content. Is it about texture filtering, is it about rendering, compositing, antialiasing? It can encompass wildly different things not necessarily related

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos As it is quite distinct in terms of settings/setup, people who work on pixel art and will supposedly be subscribed to the tag either will benefit from discovering a new challenge or method to solve it or will already know the answer irrespectively of the actual topic, just because the result that is required is relevant to what they do. That's an approximate description of how I see it.

Well I don't often work with pixel art, but if you say so I won't disagree. I have my reservations, but I don't have strong feelings about it. Anyway I have accepted all your edits to include the tag in questions so far, so those should be easier to find for all interested in the future.


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First year with you and Blender. Thanks guys!
Today is exactly 1 year since I installed Blender and made my first ever 3D... donut.
And also 1 year since I visited this site for the first time to get help :).

You're all awesome, thank you!

Mad props to everyone for helping others navigate Blender.
It's thanks to your answers that I actually know what I'm doing most of the time :).

Moonboots - the best cookies in the business
Mr Duarte Farrajota Ramos - keeping this site a nicer place to hang around
Ray Mairlot - making sure people don't get lost here since 2013
batFINGER - thanks for all the nightmares :)
Robin Betts - aside from knowing everything, thanks for being the nicest person
Gorgious - modifier magician and node wizard :).
susu and troy_s - learning all the stuff like this from real pros is a nice change after art school :).
And also big thanks to others like Robert Gützkow, lemon, vklidu, Martynas Žiemys and Leander for their great answers.

That's it. I love it here.

I don't want to be a killjoy but, while I appreciate the spirit and sentiment (and your involvement on the site), I'm not entirely sure that the meta is the place for this...

I understand, I just didn't know where else to post this :).

Good old StackExchange, where being nice and saying thank you is officially discouraged. Glad to see that not everyone is taking the rules too serious.

Thank you @RobertGützkow :).

Thank, keep up the enthusiasm and great involvement.
Without trying to kill the mood, I do agree with Ray that Meta is not really the best place for this sort of post.
I think this post is probably symptomatic of the fact that we often deal with the same relatively small circle of users here at Stack Exchange, but in a somewhat cold and neglecting way that SEs policy enforces, without any sort of warmer social interactions whatsoever.
Instead of the usual flag and delete I'll try to turn this opportunity into a learning moment.
Not sure if you are aware of chat rooms.
They often go unnoticed, and users who never used them can't easily be coaxed into one. They are however an adequate place for the otherwise almost absent act of socializing on this barren Stack Exchange.
It's been slowly getting pretty deserted there for the past few years, and only got worse after the recent moderator resignations 1 & 2.
Maybe we can make good use of your enthusiasm and revive the once prosperous and lively chat rooms. Render Farm was created far before I knew about this site, and is the go-to off-topic general chat room around.
Feel free to chat away, I wouldn't mind getting to know some frequent users here a little better, maybe we can lure more users back in. Beware that users who never visited a chat room before don't get chat notifications even for @ direct mentions until you first visit a chat at least once.
Be sure to mention them in a comment linking to the particular room so they can join in.

Thanks for your kind suggestions :). I'll be sure to try chatrooms for expressing my enthusiasm :).


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Moving from other Industry software to Blender:
why is that I am looking for help with questions and "don't word things carefully" I get moderated? Are we not allowed to mention certain functions from other applications and how we can successfully migrate them into Blender? This doesn't feel fair at all?

Hello and welcome. For questions about this site inner workings and moderator actions you should use meta. Which moderation action do you feel was unfair or hostile? Your question as flagged as a duplicate of an existing question and this is standard practice for questions that already have a answer. To avoid this in the future I suggest doing some research prior to posting, most beginners get stuck on the same issues and we get frequent questions about the same problems.

Other that that the only other moderator action towards your post was removing "Please Help", see here why. It wasn't flagged nor marked in any way, and there is nothing inflammatory or infringing rules of this site about it. SE has a more formal tone and stricter set of rules, if you need something more casual for your questions you can try https://blenderartists.org or other regular forums

There are many questions like the one you asked earlier: users of a certain software or app that are learning how to use blender.
There is no rule in this site not to mention other software, people do it all the time. Blender is used by many folks for many different applications or in concert with other software packages. Those who volunteer their time to answer questions here, help those users as well, if they can.
But keep in mind that blender users might not be familiar with the tools you mention, so be patient if you are asked for clarifications or further explanation of the functions you are searching for. Don't get upset if others don't understand what you want.
As for the editing/altering of posts, that is how the site works. You can edit other user's posts and others can edit yours to help clarify the question. The site is based on moderation by users.  Please take the tour (https://blender.stackexchange.com/tour) to understand how to make better use of the site.
If you don't agree with the changes made to your post and feel that they change the meaning, or clarity of the question (or answer), or they destroy the carefully constructed metaphors, metric and figures of speech, feel free to roll the text back to a previous state.
Users and moderators are just people and, as such, are also likely to make mistakes once in a while (sometimes often).
But whatever you choose to do, don't take it personal.
Read also:
Why are some questions marked as duplicate?


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Duplicate but original is out-of-date
The new question Bone to mesh - convert is pretty much a duplicate of Convert bones to meshes. The new question is asking for something a little bit different, but it appears @lemon anticipated that as there is commented out code in the original answer to do what the new user wants.
My question has two parts:

The original answer is for Blender 2.79 won't run under 2.8x. Should I make the edits to the original answer's script, add a second script in the original answer, or put the updated script in the new question?

I think a GUI to ask about bones shape would be a good improvement to the original script. If I do add a GUI,  Should I make the edits to the original answer's script, add a second script in the original answer, or put the updated script in the new question?

So I ended up making the needed edits to the original script, and added the UI version as an answer to the second question.

Hi Thanks for the update. If it is a simple and most importantly backwards compatible update it should probably be an edit to the original post. If you made major changes and significant improvements to the script it may warrant a new answer so feel free to post. You may even gain some deserved reputation for it. Don't forget to credit the original author, and link to the post containing the source script

My general advice is to not overwrite the original answer, but to either add a 2.8 section to the existing answer, leaving the original code intact, or add a new answer.