Thingiverse Publishing Checklist
Oops! I wasn't ready to publish!
There has been a lot of discussion of late over at the Thingiverse Google Group and elsewhere about best practices for publishing Things, and whether a longer list of requirements for publishing would be helpful or harmful. Well, after considering feedback and use cases for a few months, the Thingiverse web dev team (ie Marty!) introduced the Thingiverse Publishing Checklist to help guide users into uploading and annotating their materials before launching their projects.
Here’s what you need to publish:
- Does your project have a name? (“Untitled” doesn’t count!)
- Does it have a description?
- Have you included at least one file which is not an image?
The checklist tool helps prevent users from publishing too early (accidentally!) as well as encouraging new designers to participate in the community by sharing more useful design, cut, or print documents beyond just that final bragging snapshot. While it is tricky to stimulate communities by forcing standards, we feel this list has been whittled down to be the absolute minimum obstacle to publishing possible, while still doing its job keeping Thingiverse great!
| Tagged with | documentation, standards, Thingiverse | 3 comments |
3 Comments so far
Keith Neufeld
Fantastic!
Looks like you need to require inclusion of a file which is not an image or text: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10353
And perhaps explain in BIG LETTERS that the reason you can’t publish yet is because you’re not following the spirit of Thingiverse, which is meant for sharing designs, not just results, or people will keep finding ways (like this) to subvert it.
Keith Neufeld
On second thought, why not prompt the user with something like: “You don’t appear to have uploaded any design files. Would you like to go back and upload a design or would you like to publish to the Photo section of Thingiverse?”
Then extend Thingiverse with a photo-only gallery section and enhance searches, Newest Things, etc. to show (at the user’s selection) only Photo section results, only Thing section results, or both (like wiki searches search titles only or titles plus text).
Obviously this takes more work to implement but it’s a pretty big win. People who want to share photos of FDM-, laser-, and CNC-related projects don’t feel disenfranchised by being sent to Flickr and people who want to use Thingiverse to share designs can enjoy a design-only site without worrying about the broken windows effect of people posting “bragging” / “advertising” photos with no designs.
merlin
What about unicorn source files? Unless designed in another tool (like eagle), those are inherently .svg (image) files
I do generally post the .gcode, but I think slicing a model for your machine and posting the gcode is just asking for trouble long term when some noob with a vastly different bot configuration tries to directly print the gcode…