text:
Look at my file (via pasteall, or others) and answer me, the good way, now?
Is that acceptable? Things have changed (I think). Since some months, this has became usual here.
Is this due to some change in BSE rules?
Or should we (repetively, again) ask, in comments, for more accurate information in the question itself? Or give up about that.
Also, is the usage of pasteall or any equivalent has became the good habit here (no more blend exchange)? Even if the question makes sense only with the linked file, in long term?
What is your opinion about that?

As far as I'm aware this rule still applies What is the problem with posting an image (or link) and asking “How do I do this?”. "Just fix my file" questions should be closed if they can't be understood without downloading a file.
I have pulled back a little on immediately closing though, because as a moderator any votes are binding, so as soon as I vote to close it takes effect immediately, not giving users time to respond, which may seem a little discouraging for first time users, so I tend to await a little.
As for using PasteAll rather than Blend.Exchange, I have relaxed my enforcing of that rule a bit recently.
As mentioned by BatFinger, Blend-Exchange as a "permanent" hosting provider would be unnecessary for many situations and overkill as one-size-fits-all solution. Hoarding certain files for "all eternity" somewhere seems really unnecessary and will gradually accumulate as internet pollution.
Besides that many files, especially ones in question, are really only relevant to answer said question, and have limited value afterwards. As Gandalf mentions they are probably downloaded once or twice to identify the issue by any potential the answerers, and then beyond that point I think the interest decreases abruptly, and I suspect the number of downloads falls to zero quickly after getting an answer.
I'm pretty sure no one is downloading hundreds of donut files, or old incomplete "stripped down" blends, small enough to fit size constraints any more.
Files on answers though are a whole other matter of course. People will likely be far more interested in files that provide understanding about solutions.
I wonder if Blend-Exchange can provide any type of file access statistics over time. Not sure if there's any system in place that can provide some access traffic history of files over time so we can confirm or deny my theory.

Unfortunately, it seems like user provided files are mostly just for us to confidently sort the question into exactly what kind of duplicate it is.  I don't know how to get around the problem that asking a question in the right way almost requires the same knowledge as fixing it to begin with.

"asking a question in the right way almost requires the same knowledge as fixing it to begin with" Sadly almost true. On the other hand, asking the question the "right way" forces you to diagnose the issue in a way that you narrow it down enough to almost fix it yourself


text:
How do I create video clips that demo the sequence I'm using?
Some responses to my questions show a short video clip that demos the actions they recommend.  How are those video clips created?

Hi ttom, your question was migrated here to meta because it was about the site. In the future, any questions that you have about BSE, and it's questions or answers should be asked here. Please read through the question this question has been linked to, it should answer your question (I use LiceCap by the way).

screen capture tools like ScreenToGif seem to be the most popular.

depends on your operating system. What r u using? windows? macOS?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How do I add blend file to my question?
I'm new here and I want to provide my work in my questions, but I don't know how. Can someone help?

open blend-exchange.com and follow instructions

That's odd! It works fine from my desktop and looks ok if I hover over it in Firefox although I agree that it's showing a non-existant page if I click it. :^( I'll delete my comment and see if I can figure out what's going on. Thanks for the heads-up!

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


text:
Where do import a blend file to my question?
I already converted my blender file to a blend file from Blend-Exchange, but I don't know where I'm supposed to import the file in my question? Please provide detailed instructions, would help a lot! :)


text:
question closed unfairly again
After a year off-site, my question promptly got closed again. I assume you have read it. Now to my defense. Blender has an internal mesh representation, my app has an internal mesh representation and they are not the same. Some kind of conversion (import/export) needs to take place. Hence my question is a bona fide, import/export question of which there are a ton on this site. The reason that my question is not about blender use is wrong, I need export blender meshes, not just any meshes.

The problem is that the question you ask, as written is about a comparison between bmesh and a hypothetical "better" mesh representation.  That's not an import/export question as written. It's probably possible to write a question where the answer is about issues that might arise from exporting bmeshes, but this is not that question.

Bubble sort is worse than quick sort. We are talking about algorithms (mesh ops), operating on a mesh representation. Performance of an algorithm can always be quantified, there can be no ambiguity.

It doesn't matter whether your question could be answered factually, and you're talking about suitability of data structures, not algorithm metrics, which isn't so easy to quantify.  The point here is that your question as written isn't about Blender.  It's about comparing two data structures, one of which isn't from Blender.

I don't think your question can be answer here for a variety of reasons.

So, my question is: is there a "better" mesh representation than the one blender is using

I'm sure there are hundreds, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. This is neither an objective question nor a question about using Blender itself, which is what this site tends to focus on.

The problem I am having is as follows: I would not like to mimic what blender is doing in their code in my own program

Virtually everything you do differently from Blender is by technically "not copying" it, or at the very least improving over it. This sounds like a very broad and open ended discussion, more suited for some coding or programming oriented site.
Even there "How can I do things differently" doesn't seem like a valid question that can be answered with facts.
Now source code questions have been considered on topic here, if it was focusing on some technical aspects or specific details of the implementation, but your post doesn't seem to be focusing on any data structures or how to convert them to some undisclosed format you intend to use.
A potentially acceptable question would say something along the lines of

Bmesh uses data structure X that I need to convert to import into my app that uses Y. How can I do this?

And proceed to show some code examples. This might have a chance at some coding site, again not something we would generally deal with here.

Magnificient hand waving here, where are these hundreds of mesh representations documented? I'd like to see. Can't anyone disprove my claim that there are just a hanful of mesh representatons.


text:
2021: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

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

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Blender over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
3
9

Users destroyed³
8
0

Users deleted
2
0

Users contacted
8
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
470
1,354

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
389
562

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
423
1,218

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
329
1,069

Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue
605
2,560

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
2,156
4,850

Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue
133
764

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
3,230
2,937

Tags merged
27
0

Tag synonyms proposed
21
0

Tag synonyms created
27
0

Questions reopened
257
16

Questions protected
0
51

Questions migrated
16
0

Questions flagged⁵
57
745

Questions closed
4,211
359

Question flags handled⁵
496
290

Posts unlocked
0
4

Posts undeleted
17
243

Posts locked
2
50

Posts deleted⁶
1,673
9,833

Posts bumped
0
8,259

Escalations to the Community Manager team
1
0

Comments undeleted
12
0

Comments flagged
69
289

Comments deleted⁷
1,172
5,094

Comment flags handled
288
70

Bounties canceled
1
0

Answers flagged
324
2,423

Answer flags handled
2,518
230

All comments on a post moved to chat
30
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? We posted a similar report here last year: 2020: 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 everyone a happy 2022! ^_^

I would like to thank the moderators for doing an excellent job in 2021.


text:
Set comment as answer

In this picture Robin Betts has the answer of my question, but how do I set this as the answer. I don't see any controls to upvote or the check-mark, the only thing I can do is add a comment..

He cannot, normally it could be up to him to change his comment into answer and you could apply it as answer, however, your question was flagged as duplicate and in that case there is no way to add new answer to your question unless it is opened again by someone higher(with higher reputation)

@MikoCG But it is always the case with every post I make, even with this one your comment is displayed as shown in the picture without the ability to up-vote (which I can't do yet) or set as answer.. The only way how to close a question for me now is to click on Answer Your Question, copy the comment of the answer and now I see the check-mark button. Maybe that is just the case?

First of all, no you cannot set a comment as answer - because it is not supposed to be taken as answer. And you cannot upvote it yet, but as soon as you have enough reputation you can do that.

If the comment solves your question and you want closure after some time, you can post it as an answer to your own question and accept it. Probably a duplicate of https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2804/mark-comment-as-answer


text:
Meaning of comment at end of page
I just got a notice of activity on a question of mine that's been closed. At the bottom of the page, I see this:
// TODO sg: TMP solution until we are confident in our current implementation of async imports // once we are, we can move the if into the js entry file and dynamically load the mark obsolete module
Is  this a mistake and something I'm supposed to see, like another comment, or is it a note for the SE developers to fix something?
Edit: Seen on this question.
Edit 2: Wow - this is getting really meta! It was at the bottom of the page for this question after I added the above edit, then was adding a comment. See this:

What question was this notice posted to? Never encountered, it, sounds like some sort of debug info a normal user should never see. Should probably be reported to site admins

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos: My bad. I should have included the link. I've added it. Also, after I edited this question to add that, as I'm typing this comment, I see it here, too. I'll add a screenshot including it.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos: Screenshot showing it on this page, while I was making my last comment is now added. I still see it.

Seems to be visible only to you, I don't see it on my end. I have reported it to the community manager, if there is anything that can be done about it I'm sure they will eventually take care of it. Thanks for reporting

If it helps, I'm using Chrome on macOS. I don't see it now. Maybe it's fixed.

It seems like it was an issue that affected multiple sites. Details are on main meta.
According to Adam Lears' response, this has since been fixed.

This is part of our new tradition here at Stack Overflow... Whoops
Wednesday.
Thanks for the report! The fix is out now.

Thanks. Thought it was an error, but wasn't sure where to report it, thought I'd start where I saw it and figured admins or other wise folk would know where to forward the report. If they know about it, that's all I can do, but I'm glad it's fixed.


text:
Thanks And Hi's
I was going through some old files and found this:  https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/. I think that is from 2018 or 19. From my short and very good time here at StackExchange, I still find "don't use thanks" and the like. Being Latin American, this is quite disconcerting. When I travel to the U.S., I sometimes go into culture shock, such efficiency. In your more rural areas folks tend to be more courteous. Please don't misunderstand, I think your people are great. Thank for your attention. Cheers!

Hi for questions about this site and how it works please use meta https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com

Tks Duarte. I hope I'm the only one who is lost around here.

@Roberto being a rural folk myself, I have to agree :)

@ Allen Simpson I found at https://stackoverflow.com/help/someone-answers, the comment: Please do not add a comment on your question or on an answer to say "Thank you".  I say in the name of "rural folk" and others: Tar and Feather people who say such things. Smile

also this one https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2811/how-to-thank-somebody-for-editing-his-answer-or-comment-and-adding-value-to-it


text:
Where should this question go?
I asked a question about downloading Blender open movies - and explain in the question why I need to download them instead of just watching them online. I have an answer, which I haven't checked out yet, but it's closed as not being specifically about using Blender.
What I don't follow is where, if not in the Blender board, this question would be appropriate to ask. I've asked in a few places and it's been ignored, so I went to the one place I figured I'd be most likely to get an answer. While it's not a question about downloading, say, Blender itself (and there are such questions, also about downloading documentation), I'm asking about looking at the best examples of demos of work done in Blender.
I'm asking about getting what I think would be considered the best examples of what Blender can do, considering they're done by the Blender Foundation as test animations to push the limits of the program and to showcase it. While it's not asking about actual documentation, it fits very much in the field of trying to learn Blender and what it can do. While this doesn't go into a "how to" about something, seeing examples and demos are a major part of learning a system for visual learners.
So if this is not the right place to ask about something like that - about examples that can be guides for what people want to do with Blender or want to know what it can do - then where, on SE, should I be asking it?

I'm not entirely sure it would be accepted well, but you could try [movies.se] perhaps. I don't know the entirety of their scope to be able to say for sure that it would be on/off-topic for them. (You could always ask about scope in their meta or even chat also.)

I think you've asked a question that has fallen through a crack.  Many of the forums that should be appropriate will hesitate to answer "where do I download" questions because they don't want to risk dealing with pirating -- even though your particular question is perfectly legitimate.  You might try the Blender foundation's own forums, but I can't think of any other.

@MartyFouts I think you're right - it's between the cracks. I find, more and more, I search and am glad to find answers on SE sites, but am less and less inclined to ask my questions here and, instead, prefer to ask questions in web forums on the topics in question. I think SE is becoming more and more focused on following their rules and kicking marginal questions to the curb and I think that's making SE more a forum for questions by people who already know what they're doing in a topic and kicking to the curb people who are new and don't always have questions that fit SE's precise rules.

@MartyFouts Setting this as a separate comment, since I think it's a 2nd subject: I went to the Blender site first and did try a few places there. Blender is one subject where I rely more on other forums than SE for the reasons stated in the last comment: SE and SE mods seem more focused on policing the questions asked than in making sure people who need help get it.

Well sounds like it could be one of the items in the extensive list of https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/15355/resources-for-blender , otherwise seems like a good fit for Blender Artists Forum

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Maybe it's semantics, but I'd skip the "otherwise." I checked, since I had tried to get answers elsewhere first and I overlooked the Blender Artists Forum. (I thought I had posted it there - must have missed it.) But it seems to me it'd be a good item to include in any resource list either way.

Everyone is free to add content to that post, feel free to contribute if you find an answer. All Blender Studio movies should be available for download from the Blender cloud, albeit behind a symbolic paywall.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I may add just the link to the page with all the open movies listed. While it doesn't have downloads, for people on "normal" internet, it's fine. I think Marty Fouts is correct, that to get the downloads, one needs to subscribe. I'm considering that and likely will later in the spring - after we get Starlink internet and after I've finished a lot of needed work on our lot and driveway (it's 1/2 mile long - still not fully finished) and have time to get more into Blender.


text:
Why does Blend-Exchange say my file is not a blend file?
When I upload my Blender file Blend-Exchange I get a message saying my file is not a blend file. Why?

This is a known issue: https://github.com/GiantCowFilms/Blend-Exchange/issues/56, which has now been resolved. I apologize for the slow response in getting this addressed.

You are awesome! People like you make the world a better place. Much gratitude!

Where did you upload?  That looks like blend-exchange.  If it is, you have probably tried to upload a compressed 3.x file.  For some reason, blend-exchange sometimes doesn't recognize the new compression algorithm.  Try uploading without compression.

Probably compression is not the only one reason ... I tried several 3.1 without compression now, with this error ... https://imgur.com/2CfdBdh

I have been experiencing the same internal error every time I try to upload recently. For now, we can use PasteAll, but it's only temporary hosting (about 5 months). Hopefully @GiantCowFilms will be able to resolve it soon. Our community really benefits from Blend Exchange.

@Mentalist Issue is now fixed, I apologize for how long this took to be addressed... my (multiple :( ) jobs are quite demanding right now.

@GiantCowFilms You are doing this community an incredible service.  You never need to apologize for how long it takes you to cope with changes in Blender's implementation.


text:
Why? Is this the norm for new people?
I am pretty new to all this forum stuff and was in hope I would find some answers to my questions. The 1st question I asked was closed after 2 responses, doesn't seem like that good of a forum to me.
Very disappointed.

It's not a forum, but a Q&A repo.  A closed question isn't a mark against your account or necessarily bad, it just means that answers can't be posted until the question is better suited to this Stack Exchange.  You can [edit] a question and it will be automatically queued for review to be reopened.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/tour

And this question will probably be migrated to https://meta.blender.stackexchange.com :)

Hi bobkoonce, you shouldn't judge too quickly. i didn't see your question but in most cases beginners often describe their problems with just 1 or 2 sentences and think that is enough - which in 99% of all cases isn't enough. We need a lot of informations to help you because Blender is very complex and the problems are also often complex. And often there could be several reasons why your problem occured. So i propose editing/improving your question by adding screenshots of what you have and what you want. And i personally love questions with provided blend file so we don't have to guess.

But i can understand your frustration because this site seems to be very rude if you are emotional and you questions was quickly closed (believe me, i was often in that situation and i was disappointed too). But the more effort you invest to your question the more likely it will attract people who want to answer and it won't be closed. And after you got your first answer from the wonderful - sometimes genius - people here - you will love it. Yes, some people are annoying  - try to ignore them. Most of them are very helpful and have great knowledge like Robin Betts, Moonboots ....

try not to take it as an attack on yourself - is my advice ;)

It is not the norm; but it does happen fairly regularly.
Stack Exchange itself is an attempt to do things differently than other Q&A forums and has very different rules.  They try to warn new users in advance with things like the Tour but it's not mandatory.
They also try to make clear that closing a question is only meant to give an opportunity to fix the question.  In your first question, for example, the close message says "Add details and clarify the problem being solved. This will help others answer the question."
Unfortunately, they also encourage downvoting questions that aren't well written; while at the same time encouraging "be nice" to new users.
And, how close a given forum adheres to the Stack Exchange model is entirely up to the community that makes up the forum.
Blender's stack exchange has the additional problem that being a technical forum, people ask questions that seem perfectly clear to them, but that lack information that we need to help solve the problem.
So, sometimes, a new user, widely experienced in other Q&A forums, comes along, asks a question that seems clear to them, gets asked for detail, and has their question "closed".  Not knowing how Stack Exchange works, they find themselves bewildered, as you have.
If you have any suggestions, as a new user, about how to make it easier for new users to realize that Stack Exchange is different, I'm sure the Exchange would like to hear them.


text:
What Animation FIle Types Should Be Used in Questions/Answers?
I'm sure this has to be a duplicate, but I haven't been able to find where it's answered -- a link to the existing answer would be appreciated!
For still images I've used jpgs for all my questions and answers so far, and for animations I've seen that animated gifs under 2meg can be used.  Are there any other file types that are recommended for explanatory animations in questions and answers on the Blender Stackexchange?

GIFs are the only accepted animated file type. See https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/963/what-is-the-process-for-creating-gifs-for-questions-and-answers/964 https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404/how-to-post-gifs-on-this-site/405#405

Although both of those links (I'd only found one of 'em, thx!) are very informative on animated gif usage here, neither says that animated gifs are the only animated file type accepted here (that I can see).  Also, they're both over five years old -- that's still current?  Stackexchange's animations are hosted on imgur, searching animation file types "imgur" turns up several formats that are probably more efficient for this site's purposes.

Nothing has changed

That's a bit frustrating.  However, it seems that my question is not a duplicate.  If you'd be kind enough to put your first comment into an answer then I'll checkmark it.

Answered here:
Is it possible to post .webm videos on the Blender Stack exchange?
“Only images and .gif animations can be uploaded in Stack Exchange Q&A posts.” - Nicola Sap
The points cgslav made in their answer are even better now, three years later.  StackExchange graphics (still and animated) are hosted on Imgur -- I just rendered a webm in Blender, bigger, longer, and still under the 2meg limit, than the best I was able to as a gif for this answer.  I put it up on Imgur with no trouble.


text:
What should we do with outdated answers?
Sometimes we have outdated answers like this one:
How to unattach an object and reattach it somewhere else in an animation?
There is no information about disable and keep transform for example, probably because where was no such function at the moment that the post was written. And community keeps linking as duplicate at these answers.
So the question is - what should we do with outdated answers? I don't mean outdated screenshots, I'm speaking about answers, what have to be rewritten completely due to new tools and functions.

Change the original answer
use your authority and destroy original answer or maybe keeping it in the end just in case
Add another answer
But in this case, the new answer will be at the bottom and not marked as correct
Add the new question in QA-style, seems to be reasonable because you can make question itself more common and appeal to others
probably, new answer will not be used as link for duplicate because outdated answer has more votes.
Breaking duplicate links, and leave answer as it is.

I didn't mention "disable and keep transform" because I wasn't aware of it.  It probably existed; that answer isn't so old.   You should add your own answer to the question.  (It doesn't seem like such an innovation as to worry about adding it, not to me; it saves a single operation from something you don't need to do very often.)

It is just for example to clarify what I mean

It would actually be ideal if answers could be marked "outdated" and thus simply lose the "Accepted Answer" marker (like when closing a question once a certain number of votes exist)

My take on this is always to never remove or deface old answers or workflows.
They may always help people that for one reason or another are stuck with older versions of Blender. Say support old hardware, LTS versions, finishing an old project part of a larger studio pipeline, or if something breaks on newer versions beyond reasonable efforts to repair. At the very least they may be historically relevant, maybe as a reminder how (hard or convoluted) things were before.
First attempt should always be to update existing answers to reflect changes. Insert additional screenshots, add a line describing the new menu structure or shelf where it can be found, etc. without removing the old ones.
If this is unpractical, like say changes to the workflow were significant enough that an answer would be hard to follow if it tries to cover multiple versions, there are more than two possible workflows for different releases, or a completely new (or deprecated) feature changes the fundamental way to go about it, then post a new answer.
Last resort would be to post an entirely new question and answer it there. Having a new answer in an older well established post helps for a few reasons.
It reduces information scattering. By having all possible solutions in a single post makes them easier to find. From the point of view of a user looking for answers, it is also easier to have a single long list of solutions than to jump around a multitude of tangentially related posts that are easy to miss.
One of the biggest hurdles of people pointing new users to duplicates is finding the actual duplicates. To the extreme that more often than not it is easier to just type a new answer than to look for that darn old duplicate. Stack exchange search isn't always the best either, and finding relevant answers potentially worded differently can be hard even for veterans, let alone for new users.
A single well written and comprehensive post is easier to follow than ten superficial ones scattered all over. Updating a single one in the future is also a lot less maintenance work then keeping ten posts relevant when there is a change.
Having all answers in a single post makes it more comprehensive, more memorable and easier to go back to. It also helps people who deal with review queues, making the canonical post used more often and hence easier to remember. Gaining more votes also gives people looking at it more confidence.
Conversely having different questions with multiple answers each for the same problem makes it all the harder to dealt with. For these reasons I would urge anyone posting an updated answer to an old problem to prefer doing so in an original "canonical" question.
I understand this is less appealing for users trying to build reputation, and get their hard earned points for their efforts. Earning points these days is hard enough as it is, and answering in some dusty question of yore makes it even less visible.
All the while the new and updated answer, that is arguably more desirable, is pushed down the list and made less visible, since it hasn't yet gained as much points compared to the old and tried one. Maybe it never will.
For that I don't have an easy solution and would like to hear the opinion rest of the community.
If the price to pay for that is having duplicate answers then let it be so. Post your new and shiny answer in two places, the newer question for points (or at least a "lite" simplified or summarized version of it, pointing to the older more complete question for more details), and a full version of it "for future reference" in the canonical post, complete with all the details where it would ideally gather more points in the long term.
Again this is my take on it, that definitely has its shortcomings like duplicate answers, data buildup, and extra work for the poster which can be discouraging, and maintenance work enforcing it.
Lets hear what others have to say about this, looking for better solutions.

Post your new and shiny answer in two places. I think this is quite a good solution. I can see quite alot of positives to this methodology with very few drawbacks

Agree strongly with your thinking here.  I think one of the things that makes people less likely to answer old questions is the "solved" mark.  Good questions are forever; solutions are temporary; and really, the person asking the question is often not very qualified to designate the solution to the problem, not in the general sense, and often not even in their own specific sense.  "Flag as probably a duplicate" would be a good feature that would help people spread the work to those willing to do it.  Algorithm for bumping old Qs could use some work; it doesn't choose good ones.

And, it wouldn't hurt one bit to have somebody saying which question should be canonical.  There are thousands of duplicates, and when I have to mark something as a duplicate, I just pick one (usually one that I've answered, because I know for a fact that it's a duplicate in that case, and because I can actually find the link that way-- I know what I've said, so I know how to find it on Google.)  A way to do this would be to start marking even older questions as duplicates. and we could trace the close messages to figure out which Q to refer people to.

"A way to do this would be to start marking even older questions as duplicates. and we could trace the close messages to figure out which Q to refer people to." Indeed, I've done this on an occasion or two, for the most well known cases, but it starts becoming unpractical for longer "chains" of duplicates.

Well, it's probably always going to be a thing where the workload grows faster than it can be done, but if the problem is impractically long chains, that is solvable with coding-- it should be possible to have a "closed as duplicate" iterate through linking questions.  Although if duplicates get closed to Google, and SE search remains bad, it might not help any.

That would certainly be an interesting project. Not sure how algorithms handle that, but if a question as answers and/or positive score I think they are still considered for results, I hope

Sometimes we have outdated answers

From my experience, it's not sometimes. I'd say more than half of the answers seem outdated and don't work with 3.1. For a software with such major changes between versions it is not surprising posts are outdated relatively quickly. Without a mandatory version tagging procedure Stack Exchange format is not effective to manage such obsolescence.
Time is wasted reading outdated posts
For someone following a link in a search engine, unmarked outdated posts are a waste of time, instead of helping they can even add to the problem.
(Note the number of upvotes is not helpful to assess the current value of a post, a post may have been upvoted a long time ago, but never in the recent period. Downvotes are a good indication though, as it's not very common to see a poor answer suddenly becoming a useful one.)
Mitigation
Outdated answers should be either updated or marked outdated and if possible deleted.

Marking posts as outdated is an effective solution to prevent wasting time reading useless posts, but is not an incentive to increase posts value.

To increase posts value outdated posts could be deleted. Deleting an answer is indeed a problem from a reputation standpoint, but reputation is an indication of how much someone else can be confident in the author's content value, hence it should be decreased for authors concentrating outdated content. Regularly updating posts according to Blender changes should be the normal way to prevent reputation decreasing with time.

The simplest solution would be to downvote outdated posts, but as we know trying to help this way costs reputation to the helper, and possibly triggers some negative assessment of the user by SE AI.
Possible solution at moderator/user level
When a user detects an outdated post (e.g. not valid or not effective for any version released in the last 18 months), it should exists a mechanism in the stack rules to inform the author about the outdated content and the need to update it. I wonder if it can be done by flagging the post "to moderator attention". In case no update is provided, or the question or answer is not relevant any more, it should be edited to mention its outdated status on the first line.
Stack Exchange solution
Indeed the actual solution is in the hands of SE: Put in place a vote based on versions instead of a vote with permanent validity. Alternatively gives the vote a time limit, when it times out delete it, this way posts that once had a high ranking will just die if not regularly upvoted. I'm pretty sure SE, including SO, cannot remain attractive with time without such mechanism as the number of outdated posts is becoming a problem by itself (it's not specific to SE/SO).

I'm not sure deleting answers is the right way to go here. A LOT of people are still using 2.79 for various reasons, we sometimes see people with way older versions because their video game plugin only works with that. There is no limit to the number of answers to a post so up to date answers can be added to the list of existing, maybe outdated, answers. It's the responsibility of the searcher to find what solutions works for them. I don't agree that outdated answers have no value. It can be informative to understand the thought process behind a seemingly wacky solution. Cheers

you can now sort by date of creation or edition instead of upvotes

Stack Exchange itself has proposed, but not yet implemented what may be a better solution:  Answer version tags.  Any sufficiently privileged user can tag any answer with tags indicating what versions of the software the answer is good for.

@MartyFouts: That's good news and now much awaited. Search engines will be happy too.


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Handling of off-topic questions
I know it's technically correct to close this question, for example.
Rephrasing of off-topic questions is unlikely to bring them within BSE's remit, so the standard explanatory message is not quite appropriate.
If I was a brand-new user who had gone to the trouble of creating an account, and then had my question clobbered, however justifiably, without a suggestion of alternative sites to visit, I would feel I had been treated brusquely, and probably never visit BSE again.
I see this has been raised before.. posts such as this.. Is there any action we, as ordinary users, can take to provide more helpful canned off-topic messages, pointing to authoritative alternative sites?

I think this is another case of multiple users picking different close reasons.
When this happens a "generic" close message is used rather than one of the more specific ones, since non matches all users choices.

In this case I chose to close as off topic because it is not strictly about using Blender. Should all other users have chosen the same, the user would be shown this message, which I think is descriptive and points them in the right direction.

This question doesn't seem to be about using Blender or in any way
related to the software as defined in the help center
This question was put on hold since it doesn't seem to be strictly
about using Blender as defined in the help center. - For general
questions about Python https://stackoverflow.com - For game
development you can use https://gamedev.stackexchange.com - For
hardware recommendations https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com If you
can rephrase it, [edit] the question to make it on topic by focusing
on the Blender specific part of the problem.

In this situation, I don't think there is a better solution other manual intervention.
When voting to close it is not always immediately obvious what reason other users have chosen, and as such what message will be displayed afterwards, unless a user navigates back to the post after closing. The generic message the user sees also doesn't seem to be editable by the community.
A mod would have to manually reopen and close again with the "correct" reason to enforce the desired message, or manually post it as a comment below. But this seem "dictatorial" if not all users agree.
As a non moderator in this case one could optionally post it below as a comment as well.

Ahhh, OK! I see. A comment looks like the best possible option, when close-reasons are mixed. Thanks!

Since you called attention to this one I posted the comment there, though most of the time this is not immediately obvious when one votes to close, unless you manually navigate back.

If you see a situation where a canned comment doesn't seem appropriate for a particular question, either insufficient explanation or just wildly wrong, you can leave a personalized comment.  I see that I can leave a comment on the linked question.  This is probably related to points earned, which are necessary to even see deleted questions, but you have more than I do anyways.
My understanding is that questioners will see comments on deleted questions, but if I'm wrong, hopefully someone will correct me.  If they can't, that's not good design.
I try to leave comments when I vote to close a question, because canned responses seem rude to me.  We are humans, not robots, and other humans deserve our personalized explanations, no matter how abstracted they seem on the internet.  However, I don't always.  Sometimes I recognize that this isn't a time when I can be diplomatic enough; other times, I'm simply lazy.  But I think it's the decent thing to do, and I make some effort toward it.
I am not a fan of BSE putting words into my mouth.  I'm happy to attach my identity to an initial close vote, but not to the words, "Does this answer your question?"  I would much rather BSE offered those words and allowed me to say something else, provided I still gave the appropriate link.  I would still sometimes just let BSE say that on my behalf, whether out of recognition of my own bad mood, or out of laziness.

With you. Sometimes, I think, though, a canned comment can be better than a personal one? In this case, (good sites for hardware recommendations,) it would have been more authoritative than me. What I hadn't understood, until @Duarte filled me in, was the behaviour of the system, when  given mixed reasons for closure. The resulting falling-between-the-stools default response  can seem very abrupt and unhelpful. It would be better if the system generated all the canned responses, one for each reason?  I don't suppose we can do anything about that.

@RobinBetts I think it can be better, when it's more diplomatic than a personal response would be, and that's going to be the case sometimes. In this case, of mixed closes, personal messages from users would communicate the mixed reasons better-- probably with far more accuracy than even SE categories can ever encompass.  The user may have found the ultimate message useful in this case, but I think that's rarely going to be case, because the system is never going to take the actual question into account the way that a human can. And too much info, especially canned, is not any better.


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How to deal with questions that need more information that in the question proposed as a duplicate
This question was closed as a duplicate of this question. Although the questions share the last part of the answer, answering the newer question requires information that is not in the original answer.  Also, because of the way the original question was asked, the missing information doesn't belong in the original answer. The new question asker needs to know that "some sort of dot pivot" is in fact the "Object Origin" being discussed in the original question.
It doesn't make sense to edit the original question and add definitions -- we'd have to do that with nearly every accepted answer, so if for no other reason, it's not practical.
It doesn't make sense to point the person asking the new question to the old question -- they don't know what "object origin" is.
It doesn't make sense to provide an answer that defines object origin and then directs the OP to a different answer that has so little new information.
So why doesn't it make sense to leave the question?

I think in this case the appointed duplicate adequately addresses the question.
The fact that new users don't know the terminology doesn't warrant a new answer all together, and also doesn't mean the question is not a duplicate regardless.
If one factors explaining terminology into an otherwise duplicate question, there is no end to potential combinations of possible issues and technical terms. There would hardly be any two exact duplicate.
New users aren't expected to know all the technical terms, even veterans often call the same thing by different names. Provided these aren't deleted by the system, this also benefits SE in general, having these questions around about the same thing but worded differently, using unofficial terminology or "newb language" may help future users in a similar situation, which are likely to resort to the same type of language or descriptions rather than find out on their own the correct technical terms.
In cases like this I think posting in the comments section enlightening about the correct terminology, or pointing to an answer that addresses that would suffice.
What are the small orange dots which appear next to a selected object
What is this dot? Not fireflies question
Maybe additionally even factor it into the original post by editing it, without actually replacing completely the original wording, so that the indexing engine considers both when someone searches in the future.

If I understand how StackExchange works, one problem is that if a question is closed, a new user won't have sufficient reputation to see it, so it won't turn up in a search.  Linking the questions doesn't help new users because of this.  We're still stuck with the problem that if they don't know what to search for they can't find the existing answer, and so it may as well not exist.

As far as I know The OP will always be able to see his question and comments on it, so it will still help him at least. In this case the question has a positive score and answers with votes, so as far as I know all users will be able to see it in the future. Questions with low activity may vanish into the black hole of system routines though, not sure exactly how those work


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Why are bots surfacing lots of old questions so that they show up in Active? Should they?
In the Active questions list (which is the default view when going to the top level blender.stackexchange.com site) there appear to have been recently a lot of old questions, by which I mean they were asked from 1 to 5 years ago, sometimes answered, rarely even with an accepted answer (though I can't find one of those right now).
From what I can tell from the information I have available, a bot has edited something about the question and that's why it's in the active list again.  I cannot as far as I know see what's changed.
Here is an example: one example of this
and here is another: another question link
Why is this happening, and is it the intended behaviour?  If it's just bots improving old questions in some automatic and hard to tell way, should they even be put in Active?  There's a case that they're not actually active after all.

Yes, this is intended. See e.g.:
https://wordpress.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4674/why-does-community-make-old-questions-active-again
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/412115/should-the-community-bot-stop-bumping-dead-questions

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99672/community-should-discriminate-more-when-bumping-unanswered-questions might be helpful as well to explain what Community ♦ is doing, and why.

I searched for this!  I used old and bot and various other search terms and I did not find it.  Sorry!


text:
I wanna upload Blender screenshot videos here. What are the best open source screen capture programs for Windows 11?
I wanna upload Blender screenshot videos here. What are the best open source screen capture programs for Windows 11? Is a GIF recorder good?

ScreenToGif works fine

https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/placing-gifs-in-text https://blender.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/963/what-is-the-process-for-creating-gifs-for-questions-and-answers/964#964


text:
Question misconception on stackexchange
Unfortunately , staff on blender.stackexchange act like they're robots and won't read the peoples question and close them immediately.
I don't know what is this unlikely and unfriendly action means, I had a question for days posting days after days no one answers and always misguidance to getting lost.
Here is an example of me asking a question about : How to properly use specular pbr textures in blender? and waiting for answer for a long time and all of a sudden after my very own answer score hunters in stack exchange came up and dislike my very own answer and posted their nonsense meaningless and misguiding answer and comments and when they realize they don't have an answer or maybe any knowledge at all.
They tried to spam their way by reporting my question as duplicate to this question "How to plug specular map into Principled Shader?" and as the title says that clearly it has something to do with principled shader and it isn't related , the user is trying to close this topic and hides it from public *im sure is "Duarte Farrajota Ramos ".
I believe that he is abusing his own power (may I mistaken) to hide something like this from community* , for example people shouldn't know how to use physically accurate PBR textures in blender hence he get less competitor
How to properly use specular pbr textures in blender?

Hello and welcome. If you feel any of you questions was incorrectly marked as duplicate or the linked posts don't adequately address your issue, see Help page about duplicates particularly the last paragraph. You can also flag your post for moderator attention with a short comment describing the issue so it can be reopened. Questions are frequently marked as duplicates (some times unfortunately incorrectly), it is a normal procedure for this site, don't t take it personally, they can always be reopened.

As for getting no answers see What should I do if no one answers my question?. Regarding the downvotes voting is a central part of this community, and every user gets to do it at his own discretion. If you got a downvote don't take it personally, in the end good content will rise and bad one will sink. See https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/why-vote

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos sorry Im a little bit confused , can you please tell me the relevance between "connecting specular map to principled shader" and using "specular workflow in blender " ? if they have common words it doesn't mean they're related , yes i do edited my post and mentioned that it does not related to that question and wasn't answered there either .

We don't get notified of edits, but we do have review queues for reopen flags, which will be dealt with in due time.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos sorry my friend , i never meant to take anything personal , I do not know how to compensate ,you spend all of your time reading my problems , best regards ❤❤❤

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos check out the update

Please do not deface your post with unrelated questions. if you have a different issue that requires moderator action please post it in a new question, rather than edit it into you established question


text:
Why do I receive a "Voting corrected"?

I have in no way abused this platform, or in any way encouraged others to vote my posts excessively.
I think I have worked hard and well earned the reputation here on blender.stackexchange.com over the last few months, and many of my posts are and have been a great asset to this Q&A platform as well as attracting audiences.
If there are certain users who particularly benefit from my contributions, then they should also be allowed to rate several of my contributions as useful!
I don't quite understand this. And can't accept it that way either.
If my efforts to make a meaningful contribution here are not valued, that would be a reason for me to withdraw from this platform.
Please for your assessment, what went wrong, because I see here rather a mistake in the system. For me, such an action is in no-go, and a reason for termination.

I did a quick check and it seems they have caught a “serial upvoter” who cast hundreds of improper votes. Crudely, the more active you are answering questions, the more times they voted for you. Moonboots, Chris, and myself were all hit harder than you, for example, and nobody active seems to have been missed. This adjustment is not a reflection on you and your contributions are valuable.

I do understand your disappointment.  About a year ago I reported some revenge downvoting.  When mods investigated they found that there was abuse and suspended the culprit for a week.  They also reported the incident to site admins who then discovered that I'd also been the victim of serial upvoting.  The net result was that the adjustment cost me more due to adjusting the upvotes than it gained me adjusting the downvotes.

But I moved on, it's a year later, and I laugh when I think about the amount of reputation that I was distraught over.

@MartyFouts I understand, I'm laughing about it again anyway. ;-) Even though I consider it partly a game here and the reputation points are just a fictional currency, I just want to be helpful first and foremost. Let's see what the future brings. Anyway, thanks for your support, understanding and wonderful contributions.

yes i also was hit by this and lost 20% of my reputation and i believe this was a mistake https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/379345/alleged-serial-voting-reversed-but-no-suspiciousness-of-such-activity-taking-pla

You have not abused this platform or our voting system, your efforts have been noted recently.
Unfortunately there has been a site wide voting fraud and the site administrators have invalidated a large amount of votes by one individual user. Our site was hit particularly hard since he was more active here. These have happened from time to time and tend to be destructive on unsuspecting users, so they are not done lightly and great consideration is taken before comitting.
See What is serial voting and how does it affect me? for more information.
You seem to have been one of the more affected users, but rest assured you have done nothing wrong, just a victim of bad behavior.
As a side note, you've been doing quite well, especially in the Geometry Nodes tag. I've been particularly interested in your answers. Keep up the great work and you will soon recover the lost rep.

Thank you for your insightful explanation and appreciation! However, this really hits me hard, since I personally only have RP left from the countless unpaid work hours that I spend to help others. Perhaps it would be better to put this work into more profitable projects in the future, rather than into a platform where one can become a "victim" of a user/algorithm at any time. For me, this is just a game: I solve puzzles, and get badges when I do well. But the game loses its appeal when the rules are not clear and some obscure system counts the points. ...my motivation is now quite dampened :(

Don't take it too hard, I know it can be discouraging, but it has little effect in the long run. It is more visible for users starting out but at the speed you gain reputation it will be meaningless in the greater scheme of things. It has happened to me on a few rare occasions since I've joined this site and quite frankly they aren't even visible in the reputation graph

PS: Just for the record, this answer was rated positive and marked as accepted by a legitimate user! ;-)

I was about to post about a single (! :) upvote being reversed. But the strange thing is, none of my posts have been upvoted recently (see my reputation tab). Has this individual been abusing the system for a long time and only recently been 'caught'?

Yes, I think many votes were not cast recently, as far as I can tell it goes some time back

I think the real question is why it takes so long until voting fraud is detected. How does the detection work? Is there a system or do mods just stumble upon them on chance?

it's supposed to be 24 hours but apparently it can take up to maybe 30 days coz even in my case where i did not gain 200 points in the past 7 days as of the moment i posted my complaint, i still lost 200 points. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/379345/alleged-serial-voting-reversed-but-no-suspiciousness-of-such-activity-taking-pla

@tempdevnova: Certain processes are automatic, but sometimes more complex cases of serial voting may not be automatically detected; in those cases, when mods or staff notice it, then it's escalated to staff who then invalidate the serial votes (as explained in the linked MSE post).


text:
Collaborating on answers
I sometimes have a good idea writing an answer but one part is missing (which i don't know how to do it).
For that i would like to have a kind of "collaborative" answer which might have more than just one person who answers but two or more persons. So even more great answers could be generated.
Is there such a possibility?
If not, i would love to have it. If the answer is correct, everybody who contributed could receive reputation from that.
What do you guys think about this?

I really like this idea! Especially for more extensive topics like Geometry Nodes, this would be a great help and could lead to great answers. Especially GN currently shows the tendency that many topics are really extensive or even similar, and then a fragmentation of questions/answers arises, whereby the quality of this platform suffers enormously.

If you want to indicate that the answer is a collaborative effort, you can mark it as a Community Wiki.

I should add that community wiki answers do not contribute to the reputation of the authors. The moderators also do not have the ability to add or change existing features, that's up to Stack Exchange Inc.


text:
Tried to Help User By Editing Their Question But They Rejected It
There is this question that lacked alot of details so we were exchanging comments until i realized what their problem was. So I was kind enough to help them out by doing this edit so they could get more help and attention to their question especially that the question did get 3 downvotes for being unclear. But unfortunately the user rejected my revision. Is there no way i can escalate this to be approved by a trusted user to approve it? I think my edit was very reasonable and made the issue more clear.

Users are free to allow or reject edits to their posts. Why the user rejected yours is up to his discretion, no one other than him can tell for sure other than speculation.
The message at the top states it deviated from his original intent.

Your edits seem to focus around an error message while opening the file, but the user never mentioned finding one. From skimming over the contents his files seem to open fine, only the parenting is lost or the rig misbehaves, which seems to conflict with what your edit focused on.
That would justify the rejection.
That is a very poorly written question, with very sparse information, the user also seems to be uncooperative and offering resistance to requests for clarification.
You efforts would probably be best spent helping users who actually want to be helped.

That's a good point. Well the error does show up and quickly disappears so he might have missed it. He only mentioned it didn't work so it's pure speculation for the community to think what exactly did not work.

wow the user edited his post using curse words for his post after it was closed. he probably should get suspended or banned.

It has been removed by the moderators in the meantime. I rolled back your edit so as not to promote unwarranted fowl language so prominently here, since it seems unrelated to your question.

ok fair enough


text:
Suggestion for new node name formatting guidelines
Once upon a time, there were no nodes, the world was still simple then.
There were main menus, context menus, input fields, keyboard shortcuts, etc. and the highest of feelings were a few lines of Python code. That's probably when the style guide on BSE evolved.
But then came nodes.And more and more came.
And no one thought to consider a new style element for it consistently!
As surely some of you might have noticed, in all my posts I write the names of the Geometry Nodes available in Blender in backticks.
Why do I do this?
I have noticed with some test persons (primarily beginners and students) that there is much less misunderstanding, because it is always clear that a certain node is meant.
I generally understand the desire not to use this kind of formatting in other posts, especially when it really is about code, or just to highlight certain parts of the text.
In the case of Geometry Nodes, however, we are dealing with a universe all its own.
There is no code here, there are no submenus scattered anywhere in the game, here we have a playground largely separated from all other areas.
The problem I see here is that in my experience the recognizability of input values, socket identifiers (inputs/outputs), and node identifiers are given too little distinctiveness if you don't allow formatting with backticks. Writing the name of a node in italics or bold is not a solution and only causes confusion.
For example, I do not distribute points on faces, no, I use the node Distribute Points on Faces. And if I mean a certain input of this node, then I write e.g. Distance Min. This is clearly stated in the universe of Geometry Nodes and does not get in the way of a nice line of code.
I ask for some thought and discussion here before another one of my posts becomes a victim of styleguide corrections and I have to revert these changes.
My goal is that the current style guide states: "Use backticks only to mark up code, or when you want to express a particular node.".
Another possibility I see is a new formatting tag, such as <node></node>.

I'll use a concrete example:
In this text I write:

So that I can also control the rotation of the object, I use the Tilt property of the curve. However, so that the value defined via Group Inputs also always generates a rotation from one end to the other end of the arc, I use the node Map Range and feed it additionally with the value Factor, which the node Spline Parameter gives me.

Here you can see that I mean the Group Inputs, but not the node Group Input. I could of course write Group Input and Group Inputs, but the difference would then no longer be clear from the text in extensive descriptions.
However, writing a node in italics is not practical because it is quite possible to mention a node in an italicized text.

Here I mean the Node Cube, and not the Cube created before.

But i could write:

Here I mean the Node Cube, and not the Cube created before.

But bold text should not be used to highlight nodes, as this type of highlighting should rather mark places in the text that are of appropriate importance.

Furthermore, I write in the example above:

PS: I have hidden some of the irrelevant sockets to save some space. You can show them again with the key combination CTRL+H.

But I could also write:

PS: I have hidden some of the irrelevant sockets to save some space. You can show them again with the key combination CTRL+>H.

Or even:

PS: I have hidden some of the irrelevant sockets to save some space. You can show them again with the key combination CTRL+>H.

Why don't I do that?
Quite simply because a key is something that, although it is actually quite clear and understandable in the text, is a kind of marker and reading aid when someone is trying to follow instructions and filter out the essential steps from a text.
This has been common practice here for a long time, and it makes sense.
But now it's time to create such markers for nodes as well, since the existing stylistic means are not sufficient in my opinion.

Or a fictional example:

Create cubes with the Node Cube and instantiate them with Instance on Points at the corners of your cube previously created with Cube. Then instantiate them on the grid you created with the Node Grid.

It would be better to write:

Create cubes with the Node Cube and instantiate them with Instance on Points at the corners of your cube previously created with Cube. Then instantiate them on the grid you created with the Node Grid.

Here is another fictional example:

Plug the geometry from Group Input into the input Geometry of Group Output to make your geometry visible with Geometry Nodes.

Plug the geometry from Group Input into the input Geometry of Group Output to make your geometry visible with Geometry Nodes.

Summary

Thanks to Duarte Farrajota Ramos for the wonderful picture!
In summary, the question "Backticks or no backticks?" can be answered with the following words:

The code is more "guidelines" rather than actual rules.

There are (especially here on Stackexchange) obviously at least two dominant camps of users:

One relies on structures and approaches that have grown over a long time and are generally considered proven and stable. This tends to be the logical type (I won't say "older").
The others (mostly younger users) are fast-moving and flighty and are used to "skimming" texts and are dependent on certain "markers" that, from their point of view, increase the readability or comprehensibility of a more complicated text. This tends to be more the visual type.

In fact, it's not about breaking or following rules, but about providing purposeful answers.
The solution is what matters, not the backticks!
So, strictly speaking, this question remains unanswered, but not because there are too few profound positions on it, but because we humans are simply too different to lump them all together.
Different generations, and different learning types, different cultures & perspectives.
And that's a good thing! Long live diversity!

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

I think the current formatting is sufficient. Italics to indicate node names feels adequate for highlighting them, I don't think they deserve any further distinction from other UI elements like menu structures, panels, buttons or other interface components.
Contrary to what this question suggests, nodes have been around for quite a while, we've had Cycles Shader nodes for what feels like an eternity now, for more complex computations in the modelling area before Geometry Nodes existed we've had Animation Nodes and Sverchok, and long before all of them we've always had legacy Blender Internal Material nodes and Compositing Nodes.
I don't feel geometry nodes are any different nor deserve special treatment.
When I mentioned "the formatting rules" I probably used too strong a word. That was not what I meant, they are more guidelines than actual rules.

They've been around for a while, far before I was even participating here, and we do tend to stick to them for consistency sake. You're free to follow them or ignore them (though we'd prefer if you stick to them), the same way other users are free to enforce them by suggesting edits. I never really questioned them because they seemed adequate, and judging by how consistently they've been used so far, and how this never came up before despite the visibility our edits provide, I'd say most users would tend to agree as well, or at least are not bothered enough to question them.
Now I don't feel strongly against using different formatting for node names, nor stronger highlighting. If we do decide as a community to use something different I'm all for it, but I still think using code ticks are too disruptive and potentially misleading so I'd go against that specifically.
As suggested by Campbell Barton backticks can be used for actual code or some times for values, but for node names may cause confusion with actual code, file paths, driver expressions or other truly monospaced data which may coexist in the same answers.
As moderators we don't have the ability to introduce new formatting markup or methods, that would require an accepted feature, and corresponding development and testing from the site administrators.
One possible alternative if you really feel any node requires further highlighting, and I may actually be useful and educational is using documentation links in node names like Curve Circle Node or Add > Geometry > Convex Hull in addition to Italics. This seems to create enough distinction and value, at the expense of extra work for the writer.
I wouldn't enforce it for the overhead it creates neither for answerers nor editors, but would certainly welcome users who went to the trouble of including documentation links in their post.
This has to be a community decision, I'm open to other suggestions, so lets see what others have to say about this.

I fully agree. The combination of italics with links to the documentation could be a good compromise that is fitting both our current style, provides additional information and has highlighting as requested.

So first +1 for the picture :D

And you mean I should link every node now? That can mean quite a lot of additional work for me. I think the idea itself is not bad, but there may well be errors (and outdated links if I don't always link to the exact node of a particular Blender version).

But I only partially agree with you. You as a moderator and other experienced users don't see it anymore, but for younger users and beginners highlighting node names provides a huge support.

@quellenform No, as mentioned in the paragraph before the last it is a lot of additional work for both answerers and editors. So I wouldn't enforce it, even if the suggestion was accepted by the community, which it hasn't. The work it requires could be minimised by an extensive list of macros or snippets, but I wouldn't really want to maintain one either, so take it as a suggestion if you really really feel the need to highlight something very badly ;)

So according to the number of current votes, I will probably have to include a lot (!) of links in the future ...but possibly that was also a very disastrous image choice! :D

Well don't claim defeat yet thing may still sway the other way. On a more positive note, I'd be very interested if you curated an exhaustive list of snippets including node names and links to corresponding documentation.

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I'm afraid I don't quite understand: what exactly do you mean by "...exhaustive list of snippets including node names and links to corresponding documentation"? So you would be happy as a Mod, if in my posts actually links to (sometime outdated pages) to Blender documentation would find their way in!? Wouldn't that be a lot of work for you (or other moderators)?

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos OK, let's wait and see what else happens.... By the way, I would also like to compliment you (This has to be said, although you are known to some as "The Spanish Inquisition" ;-): I find it positively outstanding how you are able to clarify your point of view without saying: "Your opinion has no place here and it's pretty crap". In the three months I've been here on BSE, I've observed a behavior that makes me doubt the competence of some people. Now I understand why you are a moderator. Thank you for your constructive suggestions and your responsible use of this platform!

@quellenform not everyone agrees, but thanks for the kind words. And it would be the "Portuguese Inquisition" btw ;). As for the list of snippets it would look something  like a list of *[Curve Circle Node](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_nodes/curve_primitives/curve_circle.html)* but for every node. Obviously I was just joking ;it would be a tremendous amount of work to do by hand, and probably pointless. Maybe an interesting challenge to write a script to scrape it from documentation, for it to be posted here in some canonical meta post

I am more of a passive user in this part of StackExchange (reading posts only). I just read through all of this and  very much have to agree with @quellenform that for new users its almost impossible to understand alot of the things written about Nodes. Not just Geometry Nodes.
Having an extra formatting available for them would be great. The post which was litterly linked here and blames about missuse of Backticks has a lot of informations about Backticks and that they are quiet often used for other things than code as 0.5 Numbers or telling where to find options File > Settings > Window > Mode. Also for keys to better differentiate between l and I.
Me as a fairly new user in this area can hardly ever understand post about Nodes because of bad formatting and have to read the same part 2-3 times. This post here I understood the first time reading it.
I understand that having an extra formating as html tag would not fit the html rules but it is fairly often used to have an addapet version of Markdown in use. Even Subscript, Stroked, underlined or Superscript was not always 100% default Markdown Syntax (sad enough <u> does not work here) and in some Editors have to be enabled first. Still they are widly used as ~sub~, ~~stroked~~, __underlined__ and ^superscript^. Sometimes they may have slightly different chars as marker but they still are part of a Markup language just maybe not the 100% default Markdown.
What I am trying to say is, that one could just add a new type of char that then translates into some html tag or html div box with inlinestyle. I understand that the div box may not be appropiate but a standard would be to have ==highlighted==. Which is fairly widly used and still does not exist here on StackExchange.
I think having some more options to style your questions/answers easly would be very helpful and would lead to less "Wrong" Styles.
I know these were not needed the early days but we have alot more technical things to talk about today than we had some years ago. In that way also the ways to Style your questions may have to adept to the greater amount of information, technics and problems we have today.

The moderators of Blender's Stack Exchange are not employees/developers at Stack Exchange, Inc. We are users that have been elected by the community and as such we cannot implement new formatting options. What we can do at most is set guidelines how the existing formatting options should be used and edit answers accordingly.

@RobertGützkow I am very well aware of that but having enough users - and esspecially well known users - that want a change in something should lead to the point where the developer team decides to bring wished changes. As w developer I know such things dont  change from one day to the other but as a developer I also know how little work it would be to add a formatting option, document it and release it.

@RobertGützkow Besides that what I mainly wanted to say is that I think allowing Backticks for certain things would be very useful if no other way of formatting is provided. And in my - most likly many peoples opinion - having only 4-7 ways to format (yeah you can combine them I know) is not enough. I am speaking of: Italic, Bold, Backticks, Links. Cuz the other options as Tables or subscript are not very viable in comments anyways.

@AtLeastVision That sounds very ambitious! But as far as I know, here on SE a RTE from the stone age is used (WMD, lightweight/stable), and RTE is not only about usability, but always also about security. Theoretically it might be easy to implement, but probably nothing will ever change there, because it costs money and (at least from the site owner's point of view) doesn't bring significant benefits. I think granting the possibility to extend the use of formatting is the only viable way for now. But hey, who knows, maybe you'll send an application to SE and they'll hire you as a programmer!!?

@quellenform looking at how much they work on features I am very sure I do not want to be part of that developer team. I know secuirty is important but adding more formatting options should not change anything in terms of security and if it does they may just overthing the code they created :/

@quellenform It may not be beneficial in terms of money in the other hand it shows users they are still working on things they want to have which should be beneficial in some ways too. Also giving the possibility - as other sites do - to contribute your self would be more beneficial for them than anything else.

This is a bad idea for at least these reasons:

Perversely, adding typographic styles to text often makes it less readable: It's hard to use consistently and used inconsistently leads to confusion.

English has had a convention for such situations for at least 100 years and it is called out in most style guides, especially those used for technical publication.  If you have 'foo type A' and 'foo type B' and you need to disambiguate you either

Always specify the second part of the phrase; or
Specify in advance that if the second part is left off it always means 'type B' and always specify the second part of the phrase for 'type A'.

Here are two contrived examples:

Now we apply the cube node to the cube object and see that the cube object has been transformed by the node.

Now we apply the cube node to the cube and see that the cube has been transformed by the node.

This is the convention followed in the Blender manual and I'd score 'consistent with manual' much higher than 'another convention to learn'.

Meanwhile text is reserved in technical stack exchange for code and other computer text to simulate what the text would look like on a monitor.  I think it's a bad idea to overload that meaning with what amounts to an attempt to use bold text.

Aside: The manual uses Modifier–Key to signify that a key is typed while a modifier is used.  I prefer this endash format over other ways of tying the modifier to the key for consistency; and wish that were part of our standard.

The - I will call it "English Convention" is nice to have do not get me wrong. But having a lot of text and complicated stuff to explain it is much easier to actually have less text and better designed. There is a reason graphics work better for explenations than text. Formatting is the closest we can get to have "Graphical Text". So giving formatting a appropiate and standard meaning is much more appropiate than "just write something behind it". Because as fast reader you may skip suffix or prefix but you will not skip a formatting because... well you litterly cant overlook THIS or That

Typography rarely works better than text consistency. Text book publishers have studied the use of typography a lot, and they've found that typographic conventions using visual weight tend to cause  people to skip over and ignore other text.  The result is that you get different confusion when visual weight is used but usually more readers are confused rather than fewer.  The idea of using visual weight has ben reintroduced about every ten years since the 1950s, so this proposal isn't even a novelty.  People like it for a bit, but it tends not to work and is discarded fairly quickly

It may work better for plain information which is complex by it self already. Even then having examples as graphics and in that way text which is more graphical than just plain text is not only much more appealing to read (essepcially for younger people) but also easier to skip over and get the information needed. Obvioulsly formatting is a skillset to and using it properly is a part of creating a good question/answer which if used correctly provides a more friendly studing experience. Having a book with 100 words and no graphics is a type of book a teen will neever read if not rly needed.

No, having text that is more graphical is not more appealing to read, not even to younger people.  This theory has been proposed at least once a decade for 60 years, tested, and rejected.  Yes, it is easier to skip over information.  But the consequence of that turns out to be the opposite of what you suggest.  Note, I am limiting this to visual weight in typography.  Additional graphics is an entirely different matter, and not what is being proposed here.

And frankly, you do teens, who devour young adult novels with no graphics, a disservice by asserting that they will not read text-only material if not needed. Again, we're talking typography, not additional graphics, in this setting.

The Problem is I can speak from personal expirience and expirience from people in my university. Texts with no graphical processing are not appealing for a younger audiance. Please go ask 10 students and 8 of them will tell you that. (the other 2 study law xD). Its simple as that nobody likes to read 5 sites of text. But having a decent typography makes it much better to read because the author can mark important areas and the reader then can read them and if he is interessted or needs more information can read it again. That just how younger people tend to read.

Just because you seem to like to read 10 sites of plaintext documentation does not mean everyone does. If Typogragphy is so bad and not used for 60 years and each decade again deneid why does everyone use it in their posts. Why do adds have special rules for it so the reader reads a certain part faster and is more appealed. Why do modern study books use it? Not every brain works the same ofcourse but as I stated already. Most younger people today grew up with the media world and can find things here much more easy than older people may find in a library.

Technic changed so much over the last years and so did our basic understanding of design, simplicity and so on. ANd what I meant with graphics btw is not that you have to use graphics. I was speaking of transforming text in some kind of graphic because thats what Typography is about if you ask me. You make text more appealing and easier to differentiate certain things.

Typography is not bad, but the way its being proposed here has been shown over and over again to cause more problems than solutions. You hit the key issue: adding visual weight causes people to skip over information and become confused.  This isn’t about what I like; it’s about what practice has show works and doesn’t. Mixing type multiple type faces doesn’t work. It creates visual clutter and confusion.  The rare use of typeface change for emphasis works until the use becomes common. Using bold the first time you introduce a term is good practice.  Using it on every occurance dilutes value.

Typography is far more that what you call ‘graphics’ but a typographer would call ‘frequent font switching. It’s about line length and word spacing and kerning and so forth. Nothing about changes in Blender justifies adding the degree of visual clutter being suggested here — a degree that is well understood to make text less readable.

I see Typography as a form of graphic. You may or may not like it. But in the end letters are just graphics we gave a special meaning and Typography is the placemant and art of it. As I stated I think having a little more styling opotions esspecially styling options hwere the style fits the purpose dependign on the stackexchange you are on would be very useful. I see you dont like the idea of skipping text at all. That is... sry to say it like that... a "You Problem". You may not like it but in a worl of rush as we have it today it is needed. But lets talk here in the chatroom

https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/137558/discussion-on-answer-by-quellenform-once-upon-a-time-there-were-no-nodes

So as Duarte Farrajota Ramos recommended, here is my suggestion so this can experience votes:

Bold and italic are essential for formatting text and giving certain words a specific meaning. They are not an option for highlighting nodes.
What is not an option is:

italic
bold
underlined
Key

Which sounds interesting, but is not practical:

linked
other highlighting that would require HTML code

What might get in the way of code:

Backticks

But since in the universe of Geometry Nodes usually no paths, code fragments or things are used, and if then only in absolute exceptions, only one possibility remains: Backticks.
So, since there is no single way to format a node differently, my recommendation is:

Use backticks (`) to delimit a (geometry) node as such from the text
...but avoid it if it is not really necessary

This allows to distinguish Cube from Cube.
But the irony of the whole story is: Those who would benefit from the better readability and subsequent comprehensibility don't even read (and vote) these meta posts, but it's only those who make the rules anyway or are already so familiar with all the stuff here that any irregularity immediately catches their eye...

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.


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How do I deal w/ question with bounty already given (as thanks for time & effort) but still unsolved?
In my question thread Why does "nw_add_textures_for_principled" work w/ Existing Material but not w/ dynamically created ones? I have put a +100 bounty and received some useful fixes for the override problem from @Marty Fouts but these changes did not resolve the issue described in the thread's question. We couldn't figure it out but since I want to reward his time and effort and the bounty was to expire today, I decided to give the bounty to him as a huge thank you but cannot mark his post as an answer. Unfortunately, it is still an issue, the code only works when interactively executed in the Python Console but we found out for some reason it does not work when executed in the Text Editor. I desparately need an answer and I'm wondering how to go about this. Can I raise another bounty on this question like +500 or should i create a new question for this? The title would still be exactly the same but seem as if it was a duplicate question. How do I deal with this situation?

Doesn't the answer you got from the devs work when run and from the console?  If so, what's different about the new question you would ask?

oh i asked the question before i got the ansewer from the dev. its resolved now :)

Would you mind if I updated my answer's script to incorporate what the devs told you, with attribution, of course?

sure pls do! il mark it as the correct answer then.

Sorry I spelled your name wrong in the answer. Particularly embarrassing because I strongly believe in calling people what they want to be called. Thanks for fixing it.

Not very versed in bounties myself, never given or received any.
You can read more about bounties in the Bounties help page.
If you do not manually award the bounty to any answer yourself, there are a few fallback defaults and the system will automatically award it to an answer posted after the bounty started. Generally the highest scoring answer posted after the bounty was started, or the accepted answer if any.

If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period),
the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a
minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full
amount, if the answer is also accepted). If two or more eligible
answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer
is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is
awarded to anyone.
If the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question
owner accepts an answer posted during the bounty period, and the
bounty expires without an explicit award then we assume the bounty
owner liked the answer they accepted and award it the full bounty
amount at the time of bounty expiration.

If non of the answers satisfy your needs and you never accept one the system will still award the bounty or part of it to the highest score answer after the grace period, even if you don't manually, so your "thanks" would be guaranteed.
After that period you can start a new bounty on your question if non of the answers solved your problem. The minimum amount of points for the new bounty will be double the previous bounty minimum.

Additionally, if you offer multiple bounties on the same question, the
minimum spend doubles with each subsequent bounty (50 reputation on
the first bounty, 100 reputation on the second, 200 on the third, and
so on).

Posting a new question is also an option, but only if it is significantly different from the current one. If you can rephrase it to be a distinct question then go for it, if it will still read like the same one, then awarding a new bounty will be the best course of action.

alright thank you very much for your answer! :)


text:
What am I doing Wrong when flagging?
I flagged this post that's obviously lacking in details and clarity before the comments in that post came in saying the same thing that it was lacking in details. But it got declined without any comments or reason. I did leave a comment trying to guess the issue but that doesn't mean the issue is clear so I should be able to flag it or not?

But,
According to What is Flagging

Can anyone fill me in? Is it discouraged to flag posts for lack of details and clarity or have the rules changed?

You are not doing anything wrong, in this case I dismissed you flag for three reasons:

The main one being that despite the obvious lack of detail a probable cause of the issue can be deduced from the sparse details. You in fact seem to have discovered it as confirmed by Lisa's comment
Lisa is a new user and I didn't want to immediately close her question to give her an opportunity to improve it. Close questions are usually accused of being hostile to new users and don't encourage improvement. Also as moderators our vote is binding, so if we were to take any action it would have taken effect immediately bypassing the community voting process.
Although flagging is possible and a a valid way for calling attention, for these basic cases were no particular moderator attention is required we prefer you use regular close votes system, were all users can help with review.

Flagging should generally be reserved for more serious offenses, rude behavior or something that requires more immediate attention or special care.
For regular maintenance and reviewing voting to close creates less overhead because all other users with enough reputation to enter review queues have the ability to help, thus sharing some of the load of site maintenance with the community.
Also see

Help about Flags and
Help about declined flags

thanks for the reaponse! fair enough. but it would be awesome if that was included in the documentation :)

No problem, thanks for the feedback. I don't think we as moderators have any permission to edit most documentation unfortunately

As for the second bullet point: as a moderator you can indicate a flag as helpful without it having any consequence for the user contribution that was flagged. If,as you state, a flag is appropriate, it should be considered as such (I'm having a lot of flags declined, and am confused about this as well).

It's even more annoying when a flag was declined but an action was nonetheless taken to have the desired effect (like an answer here). While not closing questions might retain new users, this modus operandi does demotivate users new to this site but familiar with others on the network from contributing to the quality of the site.

@Joachim the goal is not to avoid closing the question entirely, just to delay it long enough to create a window of opportunity for the user to improve them. If you ever find a low quality post or a flag that was denied and you don't know why, please do open a meta post or ping someone at chat to clarify. Some times motivations are not entirely clear, or moderators inadvertently miss something. Discussion here may also change our minds


text:
Is it okay to transfer reputation to another account using bounties?
Let's say I have a new Email adress and make a new Stackexchange account using it. My old account would then be obselete but all my reputatuin is still on my old account. Would it be allowed to use the bounty system to transfer my reputation from my old account to my new account?
Or is there a feature just for that?

As long as you can still login to your previous account you can change the email address and profile information. Why would this new account be necessary?

Ok let's change the example: Let's say I make another account which I share with someone. I want to make sure that both me and the other person can e.g. start bounties but don't want to share my current avvount with the other person.

@tempdevnova please don't arbitrarily change examples in comments. If you have a concrete problem that requires solution describe it unequivocally in the question body, otherwise if this is just hypothetical at least create a coherent question with a well defined set of parameters.

If I'm not mistaken you can change email addresses for your current account by visiting the settings page https://blender.stackexchange.com/users/email/settings/142369 no need to create a new one.
Otherwise you can request accounts to be merged. See the help page about requesting to merge accounts https://blender.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts
Never witnessed the process myself, so not sure how reputation is handled, it may be preserved, but I'm not sure.
As for using bounties I'd strongly discourage it. This may at first seem like a semi-legitimate usage, but is considered a voting irregularity, and will most likely trip the anti-fraud system.
Your reputation in a certain site is a reflection of your knowledge on that area of expertise, and a representation of the level of respect entrusted to you by the community, it is personal and non-transferable.
See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373374/is-there-a-way-to-transfer-stack-overflow-points-reputation

Let's forget the actual cases and just focus on the general question: "Is it okay to transfer reputation to another account using bounties?" From your answer I got that using the bounty system would fall into the grey zone (which I think also makes sense since we are not actually generating new reputation, only transferring). Is that correct?

I wouldn't say it is a "grey zone", it is squarely against the rules . reputation you gained represents your knowledge and the level of respect entrusted to you by a community, it is non interchangeable and transferable.  https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/373374/is-there-a-way-to-transfer-stack-overflow-points-reputation


text:
When to use italicization for keywords?
I'm curious and a bit confused on when to use italicization for keyword terms. I have noticed that in this revision the italicization has been taken out for Image Texture. I have noticed that most reputable community members use italicization for keywords. I think Image Texture is a keyword that could potentially be italicized.

Italics here are used mainly for menus, UI items and other interface elements, as suggested in those guidelines and has discussed recently a few posts ago

hmmm i still see it quite often for other reputable members to use italicization for nodes here for example for the Sample Curve node

Have you read the post? That is one of the intended uses

yes a little, mostly skimmed through it. still gotta read the rest. but would be cool if it was consistent for all node type not just geometry nodes.

In my opinion, this should also be written as "image texture" since it does not refer to the node (at least not directly). Italics could be used for extra emphasis, but doesn't seem to be necessary here. Capitalizing would be fine if it is an "Image Texture node", since that is a proper noun in the context of Blender. That's nitpicking though.


text:
When will Blender Stackexchange get dark mode?
In 2020 Stackoverflow finally got it's dark mode release.
When will it be available on Blender Stackexchange?

Only the devs know that so I can't really answer your questions, but if I had to guess, based on the fact that our site uses a custom designed theme rather than the default one, and how relatively small our community is in terms of size by comparison,; I'd say it is far away

Should this question move to meta?

@MartyFouts isn't it already in Blender Stackexchange Meta?

Sorry, I should have been clear.  Meta is Stack Exchange's overall meta stack exchange.  It's where you typically ask about features that would be provided by the devs.

Ah ok please do that.

I can't, and I don't think the moderators can.  You'll probably have to register there and then ask the question.

Ok Then I will do that.


text:
Searching answers that you gave
According to stack exchange meta, to search one of your answers, you have to use the search bar as follow:
User: my_username is:answer keyword_of_the_answer_that_you_need
But that only shows me answers and comments with my user name mentioned inside.
Is there any way to search only for my own answers?

You may want to look at the search FAQ for more details.  If by 'keyword' you mean tag, enclose it in square brackets, id "user:me is:a [python]"

To search for your own answers include user:me in your search terms, or a specific user number like user:19307 or user:66870; not the username.

Yes, worked, thanks


text:
Images not displaying
Images do not display on Chrome (and Firefox) anymore, the alt-text shows correctly.

Clicking on their source reveals a page not found.

I'm using Chrome 73 on Windows 8.1 from Berlin, Germany.

Update: The images have been restored, it seems to be a problem somewhere between my router and the internet provider.

The images are hosted on i.stack.imgur.com, and I can see them alright. Is your ISP/firewall/office/whatever blocking imgur.com?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this question is too localized in its current form and is unlikely to be applicable outside of a very narrow context.


text:
Is there a newbie forum?
Is there a forum for complete newbies like myself, where we can ask the really ignorant questions, like how to paint the surface of an object or make objects move together as one etc?
I just started today and I feel a bit awkward asking these really basic questions in here, but figuring everything out by myself will take forever. There's just so many options...
Thanks.

with google or with the search tool you may find that your question has already been answered, for example, how to paint the surface of and object: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/65853/can-i-paint-on-my-objects

This is the right place, to get help there are a few guidlines:  state your question clearly and ask one question at the time. Note that many questions have been answered already, so feel free to use the search function at the top of the page.

There is also Blender Artists if you don't wan't to put the research effort first.

Possible duplicate of Resources for Blender

You can also ask questions in our chat or on the #blender irc channel