I know this has been mentioned before, but I never truly appreciated it until now. I’ve made my first post on the scripting forums in ages (perhaps ever), and looking on there, it appears as if everything people are posting can be found in the documentation/google searching. The quality there is really low as a result.
A while back, when I first started using Unity, the threads were all like “How do I apply the laws of quantum physics to my game object, whilst at the same time disproving them?” and questions along those lines (okay, maybe not that silly, but still, professional questions).
I know Unity Answers exists for this purpose, but could we not have a system that controls the quality of new questions? I’ve been using DevExpress products for a while, and they have a Knowledge Base that means that you have to search for your answers before posting a new question. If you find something, then obviously you’re less likely to post a useless/wasted question.
It would be awesome if the forum had a super intelligent AI, like IBM’s Watson was on Jeopardy, that could parse human language and direct people proposing question threads that are easily solved by the documentation to the appropriate section before they’re allowed to post.
@Ricky, I agree. I’d say 75% of the posts on any of these sections could be resolved through the provided documentation. We are living in an instant gratification society, though.
I laugh to not to cry; there is a lot of newbies… i celebrate that because it means the community is growing. However, most of the people who belong to this newbie wave don’t ask about Unity related stuff but merely scripting basics, and this is something bad… and is bad because despite you talk about the importance of scripting (and offer your help through post and links), the newbies keep on asking for an enterely script to do this or that.
Those guys can find a lot of info here in the forum, but they don’t use the search tool nither (or either or whatever… xD!).
I think you’re blowing this out of proportion. The scripting forum is for people looking for and providing helps with scripts. You will get high level questions and low level questions. This is normal, and trying to be elitist isn’t helping anyone at all.
I am strongly against any form of trying to filter in the manner you suggest. Your concept of what is a worthwhile post does not make the forum improve. In fact it degrades it’s worth for the majority of people trying to learn and overcome problems in unity.
I’m agree with you hippocoder; filter is too much… but is annoying read posts and feel that a lot of people consider making a game, an easy task… as easy as open a coke-can (¿?).
I just think we should get people who are looking for answers to questions (like “How do I parent a GameObject?”) to use the Answers website, and people who are looking for, perhaps, more developed discussions to use the Forum (like “What is the most time/memory efficient way to parent GameObjects dynamically etc…”). After all, a forum was designed for discussion, not answering questions.
Perhaps the Answers site is not well publicised enough on the forum, so that it discourages newcomers to use the site (or maybe they don’t even know about it at all).
By having that, the quality of the discussion threads in these forums may increase, attracting healthy optimisation etc discussions, such as those found elsewhere.
Agreed, filters rarely work out so well either. People will use the method that gets them noticed most (it’s surprising how intelligent even the most unintelligent can be when it comes to methods of being heard). It’s like MMO’s with trade channels, the spammers don’t use them, they use regular channels because they know they’ll be seen more.
I think that the issue is that “scripting” is too broad a category considering the size of the userbase now. It can cover anything from simple API and syntax questions to implementing AI and other complex game mechanics. Personally, I’m not in favour of reputation or anything else meritocratic as a way of grading posts. Likewise, I think that a major problem of having an advanced section is that people will inevitably take it on themselves to decide whether a post is “advanced” enough to be allowed in. This is not a recipe for polite exchanges of opinion.
However, I do think that simply adding some new sections would help matters greatly. As I see it, the two main things to address are
Access to Unity’s developers for implementation details and bug validation
Separating game mechanic coding from API and syntax questions.
With that in mind, I’m thinking that we might have two new sections called something like Game Science (for maths, physics, AI) and Internal Workings (implementation details, efficiency, bug validation). However, I’d love to hear what everyone thinks about this. Perhaps there are other ways this could be broken down or maybe we need more than two new sections?
The problems you’re complaining about aren’t solved by filters. They’re solved by improving the overall Unity user experience—namely, making the information more obvious and easier to find. Unity has grown a lot since its v1.0 days, but the website has changed little structurally to take this into account; even these forums are buried three clicks deep in the site!
I think one of the “NinjaCamp III” projects—a new splash / Welcome screen for Unity that highlights resources and docs—may be a big help here.
We need to move away from thinking of $BROWSER as the internet’s one and only user interface. It’s just one interface among many. The Internet is a vast distributed database of databases, but the interfaces to all that data have barely evolved since Tim Berners-Lee’s first web browser. The infrastructure is there. It just needs to be used more intelligently.
Andeeee, I think dividing the ‘Scripting’ forum into subsections is excellent. It should include a ‘Novice’ area as well as the categories you mention, if only to give new users somewhere to post and to search when they don’t yet know enough to know which section they should post under.
Used to be every time I went to the scripting forum to do a search or to ask a question I would also try to answer a question if I could. Now I don’t even bother asking questions as haven’t had a response to an original posting in months. Even searching is becoming painful as the results get watered down with many duplicate threads.
Except for a few very generous souls, I think all the ‘competent’ forum users have abandoned trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. This means fewer visits, less sharing, and less education.
A solution to the “duplicate threads” problem is virtually non-existent… In an ideal world, everyone would do a thorough search before making a post, unfortunately, in today’s fast-paced world, everyone is in a hurry, thus no one takes the time to see if their question has already been answered before posting. They don’t realize that usually the answer already exists either here on the forums, or on Unity Answers, and would actually save time to search instead f posting and waiting for the slim chance that someone out there isn’t tired of answering the same question over and over again, and actually takes the time to answer them. Alas, these days, people don’t think…
Not bad, but I’d put money on section titles like that confusing most (don’t forget there’s a lot of foreign users too).
I think a shake up of the whole forum could help, there’s a lot of cases of people posting the same thread in two or more different sections, and chances are they’ll do that a lot more with separate scripting sections if they don’t quite understand whats meant to go where.
http://devexpress.com/support/center/… This is something that has proven very effective in dealing with the problem of duplicate issues. It forces you to search before you can ask a question.
You might argue that the calibre of developers using these paid products is higher than those who are on our forums. This is the “baggage” that comes along with making Unity Free, but let’s be honest, most of us wouldn’t have Unity any other way (in terms of the publicity it brings to the engine, and therefore the benefits we get!).