Proposal: Blender
From time to time I've questions while working with blender. Sometimes I can find an answer on the internet, sometimes I don't find a solution.
Would it be a good idea to collect some questions before the private beta starts (mostly the second type)?
The background of the question is to avoid that the Blender proposal will be shutdown after a month as it happend to the 3d-graphics proposal.
This doesn't sound like a good idea for an Area 51 activity. The private beta (when we actually launch the site) is designed to set a framework for asking good questions… to prepare the site for opening to the public.
But Area 51 doesn't have the tools available to properly vet and curate that content. These "collected question" authors may or may be on the actual site. So if this collection is going to be used to seed the early site, you risk making the whole thing look somewhat forced and staged. If the seeded posts start to feel like the author doesn’t really care about the answer, the whole exercise would likely be perceived as a waste of time.
I understand your enthusiasm for getting started ASAP, but experience has shown that asking the earliest questions is best left to the private beta founding community. That's what that phase is for.
This is always a better idea to prepare questions first than to go to beta phase unprepared. In fact, it will be much better if you ask in beta phase the questions that were prepared before than the questions that are invented 'on knee' just because there need to be asked a bunch of questions to survive the beta...
You should note, however, that the beta phase will never be reached, so if you spent a lot of time preparing the questions that will never be asked, you could be really disapointed.
