Future of Unity Answers

StackOverflow has a Unity3D section. It’s a tag in the C# area, or maybe the GameDesign area. Seems weird, but they have a process for making areas and that’s how it worked out. It’s not very good. Lots of poorly researched Q’s with no answers.

Here we are, one year, twelve months, three hundreds and sixty five days and as I would have guessed, not the slightest change has been made, not plans have been shared, just hot air has been blown.

I slightly doubted what you were saying several months ago @AskCarol , but since I am not very active in the other community platforms, I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but clearly today, I confidently think this was a lie, Unity Technologies never had the tiniest intention to sort this out (I am not even talking about improving Unity Answers, just taking a decision and initiate changes)

@DetroitBrian Unless you’ve only hired one intern to run this “long-term” solution, I don’t see how come you haven’t made enough progress to share the smallest update yet

I haven’t been informed of any survey about this solution, so you are developing something without consulting the community (i.e the final users)? Will this solution die like Unity connect did? I am devastated to see that you (and @AskCarol and @UnityMaru ) are failing as “community managers” on this aspect.

Yeah it happens a lot. Though, your question still gets posted. UA is quite a mess. Either improve it or abandon it.

I would ask you to exercise some empathy with the unprecedented changes the entire globe has experienced with Covid-19 and the impact it has had on everything, including the pace of business.

I would ask that you please be kinder and more professional when addressing Unity employees; rather than accuse, I would suggest being polite, and asking for updates.

As I mentioned above: when we have updates, we will share them. These types of projects bring many complexities; technical, legal, contractual, and otherwise. I appreciate your continued patience, and when we have something to announce about Answers, we will share it with the entire community.

I am working for a company of ≈4000 persons (so, bigger than Unity Technologies), and while the Covid-19 had an impact on the business, I receive weekly updates of what teams are working on, so I don’t think that asking for an external roadmap, or even a broad date of when we could expect something to change within 12 months is too much to ask. (Not mentioning that closing Unity Answers and redirecting people to the forum would have taken you… Two weeks, one month maybe?)

In my opinion, asking people using Unity Answers to be patient is quite inappropriate since they have been waiting for several years for some consideration from Unity Technologies. The past complaints have been completely ignored, and I am quite confident this thread would have sunk into the void like the others. Ranting seems now the only way to catch your attention, that’s regrettable. Unity Answers is part of your team’s remit until proven otherwise as a place where the community interact with eachother.

My accusations come from an observation. I don’t know any other word but “lie” when someone assures something to somebody (here “We look forward to sharing our plans […] in the coming weeks”) but clearly don’t honor their commitment. I don’t think the Covid-19 would delay by 50+ weeks such announcement, and if so, a message indicating you can’t share it for now would have been welcome. Here, you take people for short-memory idiots.

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We are in an ambiguous situation here.
Either Unity Technologies decided to get rid of Unity Answers, but in this case, having some notice or announcement would have been very welcome, or Unity Technologies does not care so much about Answers that they forgot about renewing the licence. I won’t lie, I already have my thoughts on the topic.

(Oh, and 15 months without any information on a decision Unity Technologies decided to make . I believe it’s a running gag)

EDIT: Unity Answers is back, which means that Unity Technologies seems to care a little bit???

My take on UnityAnswers is it would a sustained effort to try to get it back to where it was, and doing so would be of limited use.

UA was created early on to be a user-created extension to the manual. And it worked great. I knew people who used Torque who complained about the manual and torque-Forums, and loved how easy to get useful results with UA was and how active people were on it. But over the years Unity has gotten a better manual, more and more Unity courses; they are trying to move people into free+paid UnityLearn; and more people just know Unity. Having a site which fills in the holes in the manual, for free, would still be nice, but not nearly as useful as 10ish years ago.

On the other side, it’s tough to bring back UA. A minor issue is it always took a while for UnityCo to request changes from the 3rd-party site. The big issue is it’s a moderated site, which means you need moderators on the same page. Right now the UA mods don’t talk and don’t agree. and anyone with 1K+ rep is a mod. A Unity person ideally would ask the volunteer moderators what they wanted. That can’t happen now since no mods read that area (many, many threads over the years have gotten 2 or 3 contradictory replies, at best). This UnityCo person would need to establish a presence, get a feel for who’s doing what and how, and hope after months(?) a years(?) to get a kernal of a dozen volunteer moderators back on board and chatting about how things should work. Meanwhile the FAQs are completely messed-up. They’d need to rewrite them to make the site look like someone cared, but they can’t rewrite them until enough mods agree what they should say. Then they’d need to stick around and fix problems with the new rules and be somewhat available in perpetuity.

Seems it would take maybe a 1/2-time person a year to maybe have a shot at making UA just slightly more valuable. I wouldn’t bother.

As I’m hoping you can see, this thread has instead gone in the opposite direction. In the community microcosm of this thread, the relationship has gotten worse. Yes, the community has noticed you are making an effort (mostly because you keep telling us you do), but because practically not much has changed (“yet?” he added naively), it makes repeated statements of effort feel like theatre and then the relationship gets worse.

Furthermore hyping the smallest of small positive changes in social media and blogs and trying to present them as some huge achievement… it ends up feeling patronizing and, well -to borrow a term from a coworker of yours in this thread- unprofessional.

Anyway, just thought I’d offer some observations and some feedback. I’m a lost cause, I would need a decade of positive changes to regain any respect for the company, but for the less jaded in our community it may not be too late. But you need to make more significant positive changes, like, today, but failing that, tomorrow and every day after that might do as well.

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The UA SSL certificate just expired, again ^^

Unfortunately, this is very true. Talking professional is not considered a thing anymore … You have to scream so they can look at the source of sound!

So, here we are, two years, and still not a single announcement about the future of Unity Answers. Please, prove me wrong @DetroitBrian . What will be your excuse this time?

Unity Technologies can spend billions to acquire studios whose technology will be used by a ridiculously small amount of users but can’t spend some money and time to have a proper website for the whole community?

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I do have a small announcement about Answers: We are currently evaluating the latest version of the Answers platform (2.x), and we should have something to say soon.

Well I guess it was a long time coming.

Hi folks,

During the evaluation period for a potential update, it was ultimately decided to shut Answers down due to the overlap with other more active community platforms like the Unity Forums and the Unity Discord.

The website will enter read-only mode on Monday 13th and will shut down on June 23rd, 2022.

We agree that Unity Answers didn’t receive the proper support from us, and we apologize for taking so long to act in this matter. We’d like to thank you all for leaving valuable feedback in this thread and also for all the effort in caring for and supporting Unity Answers until now.

For more information, please access the dedicated forum thread we have created for this announcement.

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