Right-Click Select, the Blender ideas site
Jason van Gumster just launched a new website to collect and vote on Blender feature proposals.
Hey folks. A few of you already know about this (since it kind of got quietly announced on episode 41 of the Blender Podcast), but I’ve been working on a new Blender-related website for managing feature requests for Blender. This is a perennial topic that pops up here on our forums every few months and it’s a need that hasn’t really been served since the days of Blenderstorm.
So I’m proud (and a little bit frightened) to announce Right-Click Select, the Blender ideas site.
It works like this:
- Log in with your Blender ID (not your BlenderArtists.org login)
- Draft a proposal for a new feature and submit it the the correct category
- Upvote, downvote, and comment on various proposals based on viability, usefulness, and clarity in presentation
Now… a few caveats. The site is still young and I’m still trying to smooth out the rough spots on it. You should expect the site to break for you in exciting ways. Also note that although we do have Blender developers visiting the site, there should be no expectation that any feature listed on the site will actually get developed.
Right-Click Select is a home for ideas. It’s meant to be a place where Blender developers and Blender users got to vet out ideas, gauge the community’s interest in them, and discuss their viability. If an idea from Right-Click Select does get developed, that part of the process will happen on developer.blender.org and starts as a design task. In the future, I’ll try to add a feature that gives us the ability to link to design tasks, but I haven’t added that yet.
So that’s pretty much it. The site is running. It hasn’t crashed on me [recently]. Please check it out. Comment on other peoples’ ideas. Make suggestions. Do the upvote/downvote thing. And if you run into any issues or snags with the site (or if you have suggestions for making it better), feel free to contact me.
I also need to give a big thanks to Francesco Siddi and Pablo Vazquez. They wrote Dillo, the platform that I’ve based this site on (they also use it for blender.today). They were a big help in helping track down bugs (and general stupidity on my part) when putting together the site.
So yeah… have fun!
Hi,
The idea is GREAT. In every interview, where developer was asked about dev-community idea sharing and discussion, the simple and first objection was: “It’s hard to manage the ideas and filter up only the ones that are really needed by community – so we won’t do it”.
And now we have clear and easy way not only to share the ideas, but also to give our voice if we need specific ideas. So the devs could easily check only best 10-15 and think about implementing them in Blender.
But I also gave some suggestions:
1. It’d be really important to have a button which sorts the ideas by current “rank” (upvotes / downvotes balance)
2. It’d help to have not only the raw number of this balance, but the overal number of upvotes and downvotes. Now the idea may have “0” number, but it’s possible that there is 10 000 upvotes and 10 000 downvotes, while the other one could have “50”, while it’s 53 up and 50 down. In this case this means that maybe in second idea people are agreeing more with each other, but at the same time, the first idea is much more important for people (even in different shape that it was said in the original idea).
Hi there! Thanks for checking out the site.
Sorting is a big thing that I’m definitely interested in adding. It’s of course doable… just need to make the time to do it.
And I see what you mean about showing the raw vote count as well. I need to check the database to see if those numbers actually get stored. It’d certainly be useful to display, but if the data isn’t there, it’d be hard to display it. That said, if there are a large and relatively number of votes up and down, my guess is that the comments on that proposal would also be pretty heavy… so that should also weigh in for a potential developer to see.
So glad this has happened. It’s been needed for a while. I’ve had the privilege of having some of my ideas implemented into Blender, and the great coders work so hard for so little, so it’s no slight to them. I just think it’s great to have a place to get an idea of what’s important to people, and some really good ideas do come up and get implemented.
I really wish downvote is less severe to karma displayed… I didn’t spam, but suggested an idea, got two downvote and I see -10 karma right in my face now. Maybe downvote should be less drastic than this. I only made a suggestion for good intent and now I feel like I’m punished for it.
I think You take it wrong. It’s not about the person, but about the idea – maybe people don’t think that what You suggested is important for Blender development. And I think that’s perfectly ok.
Btw, I think that giving people a chance not only to upvote, but also to downvote, is a great idea. In Blender community there is a strange (and, imho, ill), “silent” rule that You should only express support , agreement and excitement. But that doesn’t reflect real people reactions, when sometimes You think that something shouldn’t be implemented or should be considered very liw priority. Now, by downvoting, You can express also this kind of opinion.
Also, don’t forget that votes can change. Anyone offering a downvote should probably also make a comment that explains why the proposal was voted down… and perhaps what you can do to improve your proposal.
Then you can fix your proposal and potentially change its ranking.
@unsignedint, I feel the same. And I think it is not constructive at all let put down votes without people leave a comment. In my proposal I have negative votes and no comment, I can not know what people think is wrong with my proposal, and not know if those who don’t liked even have entered to read the proposal.
Well, at least I have a little fun doing mockup video, it was my first ever composition video :)
The left click select is one of the best Blender idea…
Most of the right click fans are pure amateurs.
Yea right. Right click has been in Blender the longest, those of us who use it are the experienced ones. Nice try TrollyMcTrollster!
Well, a trollster with two pixel-hunt games to his name anyway, but that doesn’t give him any right to act all superior. Assuming this is the same Endi who made “Dead Cyborg” that is to say.
and I hope the developers will not make the desires of the wannabe blender users…
Still no Dead Cyborg 3 yet?
I was skeptical while initially reading the description, but after a little more than a glance on the site I’m seeing the potential (ie that it’s used by the community and not just ignored by the developer side). One suggestion to help keep this seated in reality so it just doesn’t become an incompresible list of every users desires, is to either force or suggest a post be connected to an existing proposal on developer.bledner.org – and put an official box or link as a part of the post to connect it to that tracker page. This way, user communication can happen on this forum – but if anyone asks about progress or if the thing is being done, they can see for themselves by looking at the actual communication of the developers on the topic.
Yup. I already have planned to add a field where we can put a link to a design task on developer.blender.org (once such a task is created. Not all proposals will make it to the dev tracker.)
Awesome, glad to hear it. And this is also the first I’ve seen use of the blender login for third party apps…. honestly a really cool idea that I’d love to explore how it could be used elsewhere. At some point I might inquire with you about that.
Most of the information about Blender ID can be found on the Blender website (https://www.blender.org/id/about). Currently, it’s mostly used for the Blender Cloud and Blender Network, but also for blender.today. I’m not sure if there are plans for expanding its use, but it definitely seemed to fit well for this case. I’m glad that the Blender Institute and Blender Foundation let me use it as an authentication mechanism.
Ah got it, that makes sense. I was briefly envisioning various systems that could use the blender login to store user data somewhat like how apps use facebook / twitter logins to associate profiles and have functional but consistent logins. But it would make sense for the foundation to keep it a little more closed off and for restricted, more official use (like this site).
Hey Jason,
Thanks so much for doing this site. Like I posted above, it was sorely needed. Couple things that are needed, when you have time (ha, I know how hard it is to come by) is, as someone posted above, sorting by upvotes, and a search function. I know, maybe not a simple thing to implement. If it’s already there, I’m missing it. I’m doing google searches on the site and it works fine, but if you don’t want a ton of duplicates popping up (well, I’m sure that will happen anyway, but to hopefully curtail it a bit) you need to be able to search and see if it’s already been suggested. Thanks again for starting this up!
Search is a good call. I know that Francesco and Pablo recently added search to the Blender Cloud. Perhaps that feature will find itself migrating over to Dillo. :)
Great idea.
But the name doesn’t tell enough about what it’s about.
Can you rename the website to blendrightclickselect.com?
HA. No.
In all seriousness, I’ve owned this domain for close to a decade. It’s certainly distinctive to Blender and anyone who’s used Blender for more than a few minutes understands the reference just fine.
Of course, after the default keymap changes, I may need to revisit this question. ;)
And you think ‘blendrightclickselect’ DOES make it clear what the site is about? :)
I like the reference – as Jason says – anyone who’s feature suggestions should be taken seriously will get it. If you don’t, then well, maybe you shouldn’t be posting suggestions there – yet.
Such a great idea!
I do think it would be good if you could edit comments though. Also it should have a category for suggesting ideas for the site itself, something similar to meta.stackexchange.com
I really think this has a lot of potential, I can’t wait to see what great features end up in blender :)
The meta category is something I’m definitely considering. Though I think I’d like to filter that out of the main display of ideas so meta proposals don’t distract from actual Blender ideas.
And you *should* be able to edit your own posts (and comments, I think). Editing posts is currently broken (it’s being worked on right now), but hopefully that gets fixed soon.
One thing that I liked in Blender is that the software has elements of Maya and Zbrush, but what regretted is that the software requires specific knowledge to create characters, clothes, objects … I will quote some examples: to create characters, the user has to have knowledge in anatomy, to create clothes, you have to have knowledge of fashion, to create homes and buildings, you have to have knowledge in architecture. A good idea is that Blender has elements and tools based on the DAZ Studio and the Sketchup to help new users and ariar characters and buildings.
My second suggestion is in the system because I know this great software called Blender is translated in the native language, but I the software is translated into English by default and my suggestion is the following: the Blender to be opened for the first time in the language of the user’s computer, but in “System” user preferences “International fonts” and “Default” has to be selected by default.
Thanks!