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Proposal: Blender

I've been reading into a previous Area51 proposal (3D Graphics proposal) and read through a few of the beta questions. Of which, there appears to have been 235 posts over 33 days. I found this out from the dump file which you can download from the above mentioned site.

The (3D Graphics proposal) had 235 posts which covered 33 days and covered more topics than just Blender (I say "just Blender" loosely, as Blender is a big, very general topic in itself now).

So the first question is:

  • Did the user base of Blender increase dramatically, or is there a way we can entice more Blender users to come to a Q&A site for Blender?

Taken directly from Wikipedia: "In the month following the release of Blender v2.44, it was downloaded 800,000 times;" and as of 6 days ago, we got a stable build of v2.66.

Of course, downloads do not translate directly into users.

  • Has anything major happened between v2.44 and v2.66, in particular, between these two stable builds, has there been a surge of activity? I've noticed Blender, possibly from v2.44, has gained a lot more attention, but is it simply attention, or actual interested users of the software?

  • Can the Blender Stack Exchange realistically generate the standard required to generate a full site? During the beta, there needs to be a minimum of 15 questions per day. Can the user base generate the 2.5 answers per question? You can see all of these standards on the 3D Graphics proposal link.

Last question (Honest!)

  • Other than social media, what is the best way to promote this new potential Stack Exchange?

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Can the Blender Stack Exchange realistically generate the standard required to generate a full site?

Could it? Realistically? Yes. But it would require concerted effort on the part of Blender users to fuel it and advertise it. And "realistically", since the proposal is still not in beta after 10 months, I'm guessing that this effort just isn't there. What you need would be for the Blender developers to encourage people to support it, to link to it from the Blender website, and all of that sort of stuff.

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    Talking about advertising... we might want to tell the blender users forum on blenderartists.org about this. There's a lot of blender experts there.
    – Exilyth
    Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 21:48
  • @sarahm Has this been done yet? We would preferably have someone known and trusted within the community make this post as it will hypothetically get more exposure.
    – nanofarad
    Commented Mar 29, 2013 at 15:27
  • No, I've only put this up as a suggestion, and for discussion. While I do read the forums on blenderartists.org, I don't have an account there.
    – Exilyth
    Commented Mar 30, 2013 at 13:46
  • The challenge with this so far is that some of the members of the community I've seen respond to this had a "high and mighty" kind of attitude, which wasn't very useful, while responding to other similar or related efforts quite nicely. I don't know if SE has some kind of stigma in their eyes, but the fact that a proposal was made before (and failed - back in the days of Blender 2.3xor 2.4x) was brought up. If we can convince someone on one of the major Blender community blogs to push this, we can really get something going.
    – RolandiXor
    Commented May 11, 2013 at 5:37

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