Ability to merge requests on this website
There are many identical requests on rightclickselect.com . I think our wants and needs would gain more notice from the Blender committers if we had the ability to merge proposals. Maybe we could have a merge request button that would allow people to suggest a post to merge the current post with. For instance you could be on the proposal 3D brush pointer for sculpt/texture paint/weight paint/vertex paint modes and click the "Request Merge" button and provide a link to tangent brush (perpendicular) or even Make brushes following the mesh surface so that instead of the 20 votes you see on the one post, you will see the full 105(!) votes cast on all similar proposals.
It may require a new post type that lists the proposals individually so people can see the differences in each one, but the devs could still see that there are far more people interested in similar ideas than any single proposal represents.
Of course people could just make sure they search before they post, but that may be asking too much; especially of people who don't frequent the site. And yes I do know there is a similar proposal to this one.
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Rather than merge, I would prefer if posts could be marked as a duplicate of an existing proposal (with a link) and then locked for comments and voting.
The summing of votes is an interesting idea though (as long as we can prevent duplicate votes). Will have to think on that more.
@Jason van Gumster: I (of course) don't have access to to the html of the site, but I'm guessing that the data on who has voted for what is stored somewhere otherwise we'd be able to vote for things multiple times. I like the idea of locking the post as long as there is a link to the original post that it duplicates. Another possible issue is: what to do with proposals that are only partly similar. For instance there is another proposal that suggests what can be done with duplicates, but it also has suggestions for how to close out filled requests, as well as how to handle voting and sorting if I remember correctly. What would be done with my post here?
I don't necessarily have a complete answer for this, but that's what I was trying to get at with the idea of having a post type that aggregates similar proposals.
If you guys ever need any help with html/php/java/mySQL type stuff I don't mind helping out in my spare time.
EDIT: thinking on it further - maybe locking isn't the answer. What if all similar proposals had an additional bit of info on the header? Maybe under the title of the proposal, there could be a link with text something like "121 votes in similar proposals" which could be clicked on to see links to the other similar proposals.
@dpdpforlife: Definitely a fan of better cross-referencing.
The question of merging is prickly, though. Merging votes is pretty straight-forward, but who gets edit rights on the first post? How much of the content of the duplicate proposal gets merged... and how? Merging opens a whole can of worms in terms of questions and I don't think there are necessarily any clear answers there, compared to locking and linking.
Part of this also depends on who is actually doing the task of marking duplicates and how that whole process works. Right now, it's just me administrating this section of blender.community . It'd be nice to have it a bit community-driven. Like if one person marks a post as a duplicate, a moderator (me) would get notified to look into it. If multiple people do it (or the OP does it), then the duplicate is automatically marked, locked, and linked.
EDIT: I should also mention that the backend for this site is called Dillo . It's written mostly in Python and there's a GitHub repository for it. I'm sure Francesco and Pablo would more than happy to accept pull requests.
@Jason van Gumster: I do agree with you. You cannot summerize - but you could have topical "branches" of tags. So you could group some threads together if they are similar, and get an overview of how "talked about". The proposed solutions are varied - it really would only be a statistical tool to know what is being most talked about in reality.
@Jason van Gumster: I definitely don't want the original posts to disappear and the more I think about it, the less I like the idea of locking the original posts to voting for a few reasons. One being that devs would benefit from seeing which particular request is most popular, since different posters might offer unique ways to address the same problem in Blender, and visitors to the site may want to show their support for their favorite by only voting for it.
@dpdpforlife: I'm not in favor of promoting that behavior. I'd rather people with similar ideas and proposals work together to flesh out the solution that they find most favorable. If the ideas are different, I don't think there's a problem having more than one without locking. But it they're similar enough, then I'd rather promote a cooperative environment than a competitive one.
Marking this as
Done(and linking to duplicates of this idea as well!) 🎉Yes, that would be good. Making a "Collection" of similar request that sum up the votes on the similar requests.