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)
- https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/24101/55
- https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/24102/55
- https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/15692/55
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.