Awww come on Tom, we all know you just installed AOL from a floppy disk the other week.
I really enjoy this slightly increased level of forum “policing” and guidance as of late. I think it’s great to try and bring up some new forum members to the “high level” of helpfulness and professionalism this forum has enjoyed for years and even try to elevate it. As someone who at some point stopped reading every thread due to repetition and noise, I still really enjoy picking through the ones that stand out to try and help and to see the cool things people are coming up with.
And I do realize this post could be construed as the very noise I dislike. I only hope it influences the long run.
Here’s hoping we all can do a little part in politely nudging people towards community and Unity excellence.
A big part of my agenda for 2009 is to continue becoming more involved in the community and get to some of the things we’ve not addressed for a while. That means I’m here to coach noobs on how we like life here on the forums, I’m here to actually get around to coordinating forum FAQs, I’m here daily to read/monitor/post more than I had been in the last part of 2008.
The coming surge of users (when we release Unity 2.5) will cause a shift in these forums no matter what we do, but I’m here to do my best and keep us anchored during the coming months.
Are there plans for a private forum of any kind? Not sure where to draw that line–pro license holders?–but I think it would be useful for when 2.5 unleashes massive amounts of new users.
No, not really. I’m not really a fan of such a thing as I don’t want the top-level folks to all wander off to some private area and thus deny the newer users a chance to interact with them. Instead I’d prefer to focus on how we can make the information here more accessible and have everyone feel comfortable and welcome.
Back in the days I used a 3d graphics program called POV-Ray and it had a great community too. It’s still there; just not as active as in the old days: http://news.povray.org/groups/
Anyway, there were many forums (like here) including one called “newusers” and one called “advanced-users”.
It worked really well. There was no enforcement but new users tended to voluntarily post their basic questions in the newusers group where they could often easily be answered by other new users or by some of the more experienced users who were kind enough to also frequent the newusers group and help the new users out.
The advanced-users group was often used for problems that one felt were not trivial at all. For those who preferred to only browse that kind of harder problems and questions, that group could be a favorite to frequent.
But there was also a “general” group (somewhat similar to the unity.support or unity.scripting forums). So people didn’t have to consider themselves either noobs or experts; most posts simply went in the general group.
Still, the self-regulation of using the newusers and advanced-users groups meant that the noise-ratios were mostly kept in a nice way for everyone.
I think there is room for an area where people can more freely share source code and problems, without worrying as much about NDAs and project visibility. This sort of thing can co-exist peacefully.
Many old-timers are already fairly withdrawn, for what’s it worth. Maybe this would help?
Edit: My uncle worked on POV-Ray (and Fractinct). I have vague recollections of him trying to explain insane concepts to me when I was ~8…
Are there other “old timers” that would see this as useful? I suppose I can see room for an advanced section but I don’t want it exclusively private or anything, nor do I want to branch off into too many sub-forums here. I then also worry as there will inevitably be folks that think they’re “experts/advanced” yet aren’t and get denied in some way, thus resulting in hurt feelings.
Keep the thoughts coming and I’ll noodle on this a bit longer.
Sidefx (Houdini) have an excellent forum, run very much along the lines of this one, self policing, no abuse allow, they have introduced an apprentice forum for noobs which they started when they began releasing Houdini apprentice for free, I think that works out very well. Having said that they have much fewer forums in general so perhaps that’s why it works.
There’s also a hidden pro forum that is privately run, but people tend to use that for discussing bugs and improvements rather than asking production questions.
FWIW it’s not only a challenge but a reward as I really do like seeing what folks do with our tool and hopefully helping somehow along the way. So it’s all worth it!
I totally hear that HB, The quality and determination of the developers here is a lot more exciting and inspirational then the last community I was in.
If I had to choose between a newusers group and an advanced-users group I’d actually go for the former. It has a few advantages:
All the other groups are for everyone so no one feel left out.
Many new users will probably actually feel more confortable posting their questions in a group called newusers - don’t underestimate people’s reluctance to asking questions that might be perceived as “stupid” (even if the old wisdom says that there are no stupid questions). A newusers group could make them feel better about posting very basic questions.
There will always be lots of new users while the group of experienced and advanced users will probably always be much smaller. An advanced-users group can end up being rather inactive while this is unlikely for a newusers group.
Ideally it would be both. Here’s my FAQ plan of attack:
Each forum section will have a sticky thread at the top that is a list of FAQs for that given topic.
The FAQ sticky threads will not themselves offer the answers, instead they will offer the questions and links to threads in which those questions are answered. At most the FAQ threads will offer summary answers (one to a few sentences).
We (UT staff) and you (community) will be able to notify me of questions for consideration. We don’t want an index of every question ever asked, but what’s the critical number to make it FAQ worthy? (I don’t know, we’ll play it by ear together).
I want all new forum users to get an email when they sign up. That email will welcome them to the forum and offer some tips and guidance. One of those tips will be to check for the FAQ threads and read there first, then try searching, then make a post.
On the search side of things, that does need improving but we’ll have to see what we can do in time for U2.5. Perhaps something nicer via Goolge will suffice for now?
Google search integration would be welcome. On the other topic of an advanced users forum, I was pondering that myself in the last few weeks. I thought maybe a Pro users forum that anyone can read but only Pro users can post, thus not hiding any info, but preventing a swarm of new Windows users just trying Unity out from flooding at least one area with tons of posts (I’m assuming lots of people will plunk down $199 without thought, not to mention the 30-day trial). But perhaps as mentioned just the Pro label on the forum header may suffice.
But, please, take a look at the GarageGames forums for a great example of how NOT to use Google for searches: it seems like the WHOLE site gets searched, including areas you don’t have access rights to. So clicking on a search result, often leads to a “You don’t have permission to access this content” type message.
Yeah, using Google search would be great. Even if you know what thread you look for and give it the right params, the current search sometimes simply does list back the desired threads far down the list, so yeah, a better search would be helping a lot I bet.
Same goes then for new users which will flood in with 2.5. If we have already have issues with the search new users will have even more issues because maybe not knowing the right keywords to search for.
One thing that really made the GG forums impossible to search, was the sheer volume of noob questions involved. Of course they didn’t really have docs to look at, but still. While the FAQ might help, I think it’s imperative it be known that forum etiquette dictates to “search first, ask later.”
In my short time here, I’ve already seen a good number of posts with questions that are easily answered either with a cursory glance at the documentation or a quick forum search. It’s as if the individuals never bothered to look.
With the number of new users we’re likely to absorb, FAQ or no FAQ it could easily get out of hand and dilute the ability to search for answers.
So my suggestion is to make the search box flash, with a huge arrow pointing towards it. Right next to it would be links to the online documentation, also flashing in disco colors.
