2
$\begingroup$

There is a class of questions we get, which are perfectly valid - but the answer but boils down to:

Blender can't do that.


Often answers try to show workaround or some way to export to some external tool to perform the operation, use a hacky script... but they are often unsatisfactory solutions.

The thing about these questions is they can be seen as indirect feature requests, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But since its a sore-point that the Blender community has an insatiable appetite for posting there wish-lists, I'm hesitant to promote anything which may make SE into a place to feature request.

Having said that, I was wondering if it would be useful to have an unsupported tag. This means...

unsupported: The question is perfectly valid, but the functionality isn't supported.


As a developer this gives us the ability to view highly voted questions with the tag unsupported. Which can be translated into...

Things which would be really nice to support and the community obviously wants.

I'm wary to promote this though, since I think it could end up being mis-used.

On the other hand - questions can be a good way to highlight missing features too.

Some examples of features added as a reaction to questions, (there are more, this is just some I could find from a quick look)

The main downside of this AFAICS is.

  • It can be seen as a mis-use of SE to vote up good features, not good questions.
  • Users may knowing ask about non-existing features "Does BLAH feature exist?", rather than explaining the problem in full, (which would be a better question). Perhaps these can be closed as feature-requests.

On the other hand, if a popular feature doesn't exist, assuming it is also a valid question being asked - newer users would probably ask at some point anyway.

$\endgroup$

1 Answer 1

5
$\begingroup$

It is best to leave tags to describe what the question is about, and not get into labeling questions with other issues by using tags. Certainly, you include that information as part of your answer, but using tags to describe things like like "not supported" or "too easy" (or other issues with the question) are what we call "meta tags", and they are strongly discouraged. See:

Death of Meta Tags

$\endgroup$
1
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Good point, for development purposes its nice to see a list of feature's not yet implemented, but I guess this could be maintained elsewhere. $\endgroup$
    – ideasman42
    Feb 3, 2015 at 6:04

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .