I think it's a very serious problem that these forums are abused by people who do not understand that these forums are for development related topics. Because of this, it would appear that it is difficult to have a conversation as to the merits of a particular feature with the people responsible for development.

Is there a better venue for kind of discussion?
In addition, I think it would be very productive to do the following with regards to isolating these forums from users of blender. Instead of listing these forums when clicking on the forums link in the community section one should link to a landing page that says the following:


-> User Forums <- -> Development Forums <-

With user forums linking to blenderartists. I think this would significantly reduce the amount of incorrectly placed discussions and be conducive to creating a forum for development discussions. I can't imagine, developers or people interested in discussing the nature of the features of blender are fond of reading through the non-relevant posts in these forums.

Quote:

Is there a better venue for kind of discussion?

The development forums here are basically a low-bandwidth interface to Blender Development. They do get read, but most of the real action takes place on the bf-committers mailing list and the #blendercoders IRC channel on freenode.net .

We do need to do a better job of herding user questions off the the user forums.

If you post to the bf-committers list, don't forget to subscribe first!