Provide rules and alternatives when posting to blender developer channels
Problem
There have been users who are frustrated to see their posts recently removed from various developer channels for referencing other software implementations. While it's understandable that blender wouldn't want to be implicated on infringing copyright it's also understandable that people best communicate their ideas through concepts they've used in other software. I realize it'd be best if they communicated through blender terms but when in a stream of thought and limited with bandwidth to think in terms of the application (or in terms that developers never thought the application could go) people tend to gravitate to implementations they've used before to cobble up a rough draft of a proposal.
The main problem is that the only instance of this restriction is listed in this e-mail from ton and deleting posts outright with no alternative seems heavy handed-- especially if people have been working hard on drafting a proposal.
Proposal
I suggest, for now, rather than outright deleting posts first warn a user that a post will be deleted within a certain amount of time (x number of hours) and that they're free to post it on RCS or blender artists but not the development channels until it's better drafted in specific terms. This would provide clarity on blender's stance of "censorship" in developer specific communication.
Ultimately there should be rules and guidelines to devtalk / developer.blender.org posts to help people understand why their post might get deleted for posting certain images or a word filter that will disable posts from being posted if they have mention of other software implementations (a regular expression that looks for words like 'maya', 'autodesk', 'houdini'). If blocked, the poster is given alternatives to post their implementation idea (RCS, BA, etc).
7 Comments
This is a lost cause. ⚰️
The crackdown will continue until morale improves!
Then if u want to bring attention - better to use less words and few words titles. And this image not the best choice too... I suspect half of today Blender users may not even know where it from.
thank you for making me feel old I guess :')
I agree that rules could be more explicit.
Pablo Vasquez talk about this in the most recent Blender Today. You can check this out. Basically you can't explicitly talk about others software as is could be infringing copyright.
Looks like most of people here don't care... Maybe RCS is not the best place for discussing rules paper for devs website. Maybe better to create some topic on devtalks?
* @IIIFGIII * maybe yes