I wanted to let everyone know that I’m going to start rolling out some additional forum changes in the next few minutes. Here is a list of what’s changed/changing so y’all know what to expect:
When folks sign up for a forum account they get an email that welcomes them on board. That email is being updated so it now requests that folks look around for answers prior to posting their questions. It does so by instructing them to read the FAQ threads (what?! read on…) and use the search first, posting questions second.
Each section of the forums will have a named moderator listed at the top of that section’s main thread view. If you have any questions about a particular forum section, want threads moved/deleted or anything else, you can either ping me (as always) or the named forum moderator.
Various sections of the forums will now get sticky FAQ threads! The FAQ threads will be found in each forum section, they’ll be sticky so they stay at the top, and they’ll be locked so only admins/moderators can edit them. Each FAQ will have admin names listed that you can contact if you want to suggest questions, answer links or other edits/changes you think are necessary. These are live and meant to be kept current so help us with that!
This is just another stage in a series of forum upgrades and improvements. Y’all likely know about the server/hardware upgrade we recently made to improve forum stability and speed. Today we’re here with these content-focused updates to hopefully make it easier to find moderators and help reduce the number of repetitive questions being asked. Later on we’re still planning to upgrade the forum software to a new version as that will introduce new admin and user features that we’d love to bring into the mix.
Ok, I’m off to attend to those efforts, post up if you have any questions!
Awesome! Could some of the points of the “welcome” email be stickied somewhere for existing users to read?
The “moderator” tag on the forum overview seems a bit noisy. Alternatively, could you just highlight the same tag in the top of the sub-forum overview?
Where exactly would you want that? I’m open to suggestions.
Sorry, we’re about to have a flood of new users who know nothing of who I am or others are, having us clearly listed somewhere is necessary and for now, that’s how we’re doing it (translation: cope with it please ). We may trim them down to one person per forum section eventually though, that I can see as helpful. But again, for now let’s roll with it.
Edit: FYI, here is the email text that will go out to all new forum users:
Greetings, Please keep this email for your records. Your account information is as follows: ---------------------------- Username: Password: ---------------------------- Your account is currently inactive, you must visit the following link in order to activate and begin using it:
Please do not forget your password as it has been encrypted in our database and we cannot retrieve it for you. Should you forget your password then you should contact a forum Admin to reset it for you. Before posting your questions please take a few extra minutes to look for existing threads on the same or similar topics as many questions have been asked and answered before. You can do that by checking each section’s FAQ thread as well as by using the forum search: http://forum.unity3d.com/search.php Of course there’s no way that every question has already been asked, so if you don’t find any helpful answers then post your questions so we can all try to help as needed. Thank you for registering and we’ll see you on the forums! Thanks, The Unity Team
Unfortunately we cannot turn off the forum home page listing as it is (the red text and all that). The real goal and desire is to have those names listed in each forum section, but our current software version won’t let us have one (list names in the forum section) without the other (having those names appear on the forum home page). So for now it’s something to cope with that we’ll look to change when we upgrade to a new version of the forum software.
For now I’m more concerned with the functional gain offered than your, my or anyone’s sense of “ugliness”.
It’s Unity Technologies (in use since Sept/Oct 2007).
That or use a Google based search… We’ll look at and touch up that email as needed but for now it’s a definite improvement from before. When we do the forum software update we can hopefully look at improving the search (either through the upgrade or by incorporating some sort of Google-based search).
You’re not able to delete posts you did anymore. I found this rather helpful as sometimes you’re doubleposting for whatever reason (happy shiny server) or just hit the wrong button. In such cases it simply spares you the “.” posts.
May I suggest you add Sphinx as your search daemon - its what a lot of big boards use and it also has the effect of dramitically reducing load on your server.
Sure, youc an always offer suggestions. As noted earlier in this thread there are more changes on the way and clearly the search is one area that needs improving. Thanks for the tip, we’ll keep that in mind!
Interesting, nobody that I know of is tweaking the forum settings so I’m not sure what’s up with that.
That’s a possibility down the line as we’re not fully pleased with the current software. I’m on a number of other forums that use vBulletin and I quite like the way they operate. For now we’re testing (privately) a newer version of our current software for another update push in a week or three. A month or more down the line is when we can realistically consider shifting to all new software… We’ll see how it all goes.
I prefer SMF over (all) other forum softwares, but to each their own. Sometimes it’s fun to set up a forum on software you haven’t used before just to get a feel for it and play around with what it can do.
I guess I’ll just have to suppress my potent anti-change gene for a while here while I get used to it