I may be alone in my thoughts here about the beta discussions area but I don’t like it. It has changed search engines a lot. It seems to be harder now as the search engines are confused between the two sources indexed. The new discussion area in my mind seems to ramble more and is less to the point and the thread format makes it hard to find answers. I don’t really know for sure why I dislike it, but I’ve found it not helpful most of the time. I don’t know if these have different purposes but Google sure doesn’t know.
Unity forums have plenty of scripts and answers that are still relevant to this day and the two areas are messing up queries. If you all prefer the new discussions page then I guess I’m wrong in my assessment, but I’ve asked around and most people I’ve spoken to agree searching is a mess and the new discussions are confusing.
I don’t know if things will change for the better down the road, but I prefer the forums as answers are easier to spot. If I’m wrong then no worries, but I’m curious if others feel the same as I do.
I feel the same. I did gave it a go for a couple weeks, but I just couldn’t get used to it. It seems noisy and intent to make me actively go to the site and check for new content. Whereas here in the forum, I subscribe to a category and get emails.
Sure, Discussions also sends out emails. I can’t remember what was wrong with them, I think either they packed many discussion topics in a single email or just the frequency was too high and the filtering near useless because no one uses the tags appropriately so you cannot effectively filter out noise.
With the forum, I get ONE email for every new thread on a forum (category) I watch, and I subsequently get ONE email for either every or the first unseen reply to a thread I purposefully watch or commented on. It’s also easy to dismiss emails thanks to the content preview, Discussions has too little context in the emails so I’m forced to jump to the site in order to get more info.
The atomicity and the fact that it works asynchronously - I go through my emails every now and then and if something catches my interest, I read or respond to it - eventually made me ignore Discussions altogether again and stick to the forum.
From a frequent reader/writer perspective Discussions has too much noise, and too little of interest respectively no effective tools to filter for the worthwhile posts.
Don’t worry, they are planning to move the forums too so it will be equally bad searching for anything. Although they planned to moved EOY and they apparently won’t, so will see next year.
Until then, I will drink to that Unity always chooses the worse solution for almost everything they touch lately. Happy New Year!
I wasn’t like this until they fucked up with the runtime fee and the second ToS debacle. I was a very big fan of Unity. They fucked up that too. Good luck with the Discord, but it is your decision and it has nothing to do with me. You can ignore me (there is a button for it) and you could be anywhere you like. And I really don’t mind, well, more like I really don’t care.
In case you’re unaware, you can confine a web search to a site by appending something like site:forum.unity.com to the end of it.
You can also remove results from web searches with: -site:discussions.unity.com
Imo the largest problem with Discussions isn’t with the site itself (though it needs a massive overhaul that they’re gonna have to do before it ever becomes the Forum), but the fact it replaced Unity Answers, which was on death’s door and producing limited value for years. I had to filter Answers out of searches for the exact same reasons, it’s just now moved sites.
Perhaps care that you’re being a toxic presence by actively making everything you touch hostile. Go touch grass—and yes, happily ignored.
Runtime fiasko made a lot of people rightfully upset and many have left as result. Many liked the engine before, so you’re seeing consequences for unity actions. In the first place people are upset, because they care about the company.
Regarding unity discussions… I took a look, that’s Lithium and unity connect all over again. It even looks the same. They’ll waste a ton of money on it, pretend that nothing is wrong, then will axe it few years later.
I’m completely fine with this. There are entirely too many people who think this company can do no wrong and that we should just accept every asinine whim that they come up with. Let Discord have the people who can’t critically think for themselves.
Back to the actual topic of this thread: Unity tried replacing the forums a decade ago with a barely tested product known as Lithium and it massively backfired. It’s just a shame they didn’t seem to have learned anything from that fiasco.
Google’s search feature can assist with getting the correct result you need but that only works while the forums exist. Once Unity shuts down the forums an incredible wealth of information will no longer be available, and some of us who could recreate some of that info (like myself) won’t be moving to the new system.
Ya that is true, but I’m more concerned the way the future looks. New users won’t exactly be typing that in, or even know about the wealth of knowledge the community has built around Unity.
You don’t need to build a strawman, criticism is completely welcome. It’s the constant unpleasantness and hostility brought to almost any thread that’s the problem. None of the other comments irk me.
Are you saying that the idea of eventually porting the Forums after they overhaul Discussions is not learning, that the takeaway is to just stick with this forum? Because they haven’t done anything yet but port Answers, and done it with open source software that matched the needs of that port.
Discussions has problems: the previously mentioned stuff in this thread, a lack of a good hierarchy (emphasised with unstructured tagging), certain lacking moderation features, much more padding and whitespace, some strange Discourse-specific thread UX, the list does go on…
But imo if most of it was fixed there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a port. The post authoring is much better with markdown, it has robust spam filtering, and its software is flexible and extensible. This forum isn’t particularly special, and has its own large problems.
Trying to get some specifics out of the thread’s topic as I see it: Discussions caters for Answers now, which does silo this forum away from that level of content. If you think that silo is valuable for search engines, then that sounds like something they should consider in regards to any ongoing changes. I do site-specific searches to try to get a better hit rate for good answers, and I could see that going away with a unification of sites.
Unity Answers had its problems but the biggest one was that the people most able to assist weren’t and still aren’t interested in it. Unity Discussions improves upon the software of the system but that’s all it does. The core problem remains that the people best able to help are on the forums.
Unity’s solution is to just kill the forums and hope that some people will stick around to move to Unity Discussions which is an asinine solution that is just as likely to drive people away from their communities and potentially away from the engine itself.
It’s essentially the same tactic as a bully saying “you can either play my way, or you can get off the playground”.
Nothing ever gets fixed. The company couldn’t implement a spam filter on forums in last 10 years. So expect the same treatment for this “new” idea. . As I said, we had unity connect and lithium before. Assume that current state is the final one and nothing will ever be addressed.
During connect “experiment”, unity tried to force people to migrate to the connect people by force, by closing job forums. Didn’t work. People instead were making alternative sites. You can see an echo of those here.
Same thing is pretty much guaranteed to happen this time.
Do you seriously belive, it will ever happen? Have you been watching Unity closely enough over the years, to even belive this wish?
No one really use that kind of query, to find answers on web search. You also limit search just to forum, while relevant answers may be outside of such.
To be honest, Discord is not a good place for professional work in long run. It is difficult to find relevant answers. And can get only responses by people, who are actively watching the space. Discord forum is only pretending solving problem. But it doesn’t improve search. Makes it unusable for large active communities.
I often find few years old threads on forum, which are valid even today. Or historical threads. Also, from experience many companies find people on forums, because they can monitor their historical activity in relevant subject. That is lost out of bat on systems like discord.
Additionally discord shows locking content against new emerging technologies and tools. Including AI, like for example Chat GPT.
If you would be actively watching forum and know user well enough, you would straight away realise, person had historically gave lots of great input to the Unity community. It is just recent Unity events, which made person as many others, upset for their actions. Which reflects on the mood on the forum. Saying “always” it is bad and incorrect generalisation here.
Okay, let me clarify: Most current interactions by a select few Forum users are hostile, useless, exclusionary, and make parts of this space an awful place to interact with, where proper feedback is difficult to give without being immediately surrounded by vitriol. This user is one of many, but over the past few months where I have been looking they have regularly popped up with this behaviour. It frustrated me to see it again, and I responded rashly. I would like to see some reflection in regards to that sort of posting, partly as I’m sure there’s people like me who are actually looking for useful content but are instead just finding this.
I am aware of the faults of the Discord, and I’m not personally advocating for it for any reason other than not got this problem. (Though it has its own community issues).
In contrast to both the Forum and Discord though, as Ryiah says Discussions has almost no community. Limited people were interested in Answers, and that continues with Discussions. It’s currently got extremely limited value, but like additionally publishing Technical Articles there, I imagine if more value is added and centralised, it’s not a completely unpromising and dead-end idea like Lithium. If it’s left as is, or just changed minimally, I totally agree it’s not going to work.
Well, here is your reflection. I’m outta’ here. I asked the forum gods to delete my forum account so I probably will be gone in a couple of days and the prestigious “Deleted User” will be behind all my good and bad postings. Have a good lukewarm, cozy forum existence where no one will remain to object any shitty move Unity does all the time. I personally had enough.
Your entire post can be summed up as: “I’ve never visited a section of the forum other than General Discussion but let me give you my opinion on the entirety of the forum”.
You started a thread saying “I think this is bad, am I alone feeling like this?” and then when people agreed with you a little too enthusiastically, you got pissed off at the negativity?
This thread wasn’t started by the referenced user. Am I misunderstanding you here?
This is definitely a stepping stone to the bad ending where more sycophants run off unchecked, shutting down criticism and only blaming users. I’ll be sorry to see you go.