OctoPrint On Air: New Q&A approach (Patreon)

I recently asked you  for feedback about the current format of the OctoPrint On Air broadcasts, since I noticed the live attendance to be somewhat low, and the amount of questions for the Q&A section also running somewhat low.

Some of you apparently never got the notifications from Patreon about the scheduled broadcasts, explaining the low attendance even on voted for appointments. In general, I strongly suggest making sure that messages from "bingo@patreon.com" are never sent to spam by your email client (I added a rule in my Gmail account for that as well since I also noticed the spam filter to sometimes eat them up). As mentioned in the last broadcast appointment announcement I also created an event list for the broadcasts a while ago that you can subscribe to with your calendar. And for good measure I've also now created the twitter account @OctoPatreon to which I'll share links to all non-cross-posted posts I make on the Patreon activity feed, to give you an additional way to make sure you don't miss any of those! I might even send out a short reminder there before any scheduled event start, as a heads-up.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the other issue: running dry on questions to answer during the Q&A section of the broadcasts. I suggested in the discussion to simply set up some always-available question dump, to allow you to always add questions to the pile without having to wait for the next appointment to be set and such, and that suggestion appeared to have some supporters. So I've done just that now via Google Forms:

OctoPrint On Air Q&A 

The questions submitted there will be collected in a spreadsheet which I'll also annotate with the links to the youtube recording answering the question.

Based on that being setup, let's try something new: we no longer will fix an appointment for a broadcast anymore in the hopes that enough questions will be available in time to answer then during the broadcast, but instead we'll schedule an appointment once there are at least 5 or so unanswered questions available. With that plus whatever anyone in attendance might also ask during the live chat I guess we'll no longer run dry and it also allows me to plan the broadcasts ahead way more better (less "errrr... I don't know, I'll have to think about that a bit" as answer, more chance to e.g. also make short demos or micro tutorials of how to do certain things).

I hope that is something all of you on the broadcast tier can live with - and if not, please speak up! I want to find a solution here that makes everyone happy, but without the shortcomings of the approach we so far drove.