One of the first things I did was try to find a way to follow the instructions to create a thread about the new discussions site on the Unity Discussions Feedback topic. At the top of the Unity Discussions Feedback page there is a New Topic button. That button leads to a dropdown with several product areas:
None of these things are Unity Discussions Feedback. It’s very clunky to me that the top-most New Topic button wouldn’t be able to actually reply to the product area I’m browsing.
When I did try one of those product areas, I found that the dropdown for the product area looks like you can click on it to change it, but you can’t.
It took me quite a long time to figure out how I could actually reply to this product area. I finally found this link at the bottom: There are no more Unity Discussions Feedback topics. Ready to [start a new conversation?]
Weird that this would only be at the bottom, but it worked. But then it occurred to me: how will this handle on other product area where there are a bunch of existing topics. Sure enough, due to the infinite scroll I could never actually get that bottom link to show up, since there were always more to load. I presume that I could have hit page down a million times until the end of the topic list and eventually this would get me the “no more” topic link.
There should be a way right at the top of the product area to post to the current topic you are browsing.
Edit: Had to go and change all my nomenclature. Just doesn’t seem intuitive that what used to be a “forum” is now a “product area” and a “thread” is now a “topic”.
Additionally i would like to say, I like very much the discussions design, but, I feel pretty hard to wrap my head around the fact that “Topic” is in fact equivalent to “Post” inside, and now Posts are the answers inside a Topic, for me is really hard to get used to this, personally
Reddit uses the word “post” for what most other places would call “threads” or “topics”. Most other places (in my history going back to usenet in the 90s) just use “post” to mean any message/comment on a thread.
Nowadays, a “threaded” view is what people call something like reddit, where replies go off into “subthreads” and can be collapsed/expanded, as opposed to “flat” views where every reply just goes one after the other. My memory is this is a meaning that came later, with “thread” just meaning a “top-level” post and its replies. Many people think it’s a “geeky” term, but it really just came from the pre-existing use of “a thread of conversation”.
Discourse is a weird mutant. It’s seemingly flat, but then when you reply to someone directly (rather than using the reply at the very bottom), it groups those replies until “X replies” right at the bottom of the message that was replied to. In my opinion, this is a terrible middle solution that loses the benefits of both approaches and introduces a lot of bad UX.
The makers of Discourse have some odd (to my mind) ideas about UX. Did you know that the term “thread” is/was (not sure now) banned on the company’s public Discourse discussion board (where they talk about Discourse itself)?
Wow, the more that I read up on the core developers of Discourse the more I come away with the impression that they’re just as crazy as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists. Just reading their posts to their official community I’m left wondering if they think the moon landings were faked and the Earth is flat. I don’t mind using an existing Discourse community if the alternative is never interacting with said community but I would never consider it for my own communities based solely off of the assinine posts that they’ve made towards their community. They simply come across as too unreasonable and nonsensical.
Fortunately I’m getting a very different vibe from the people developing and running this community. I trust them to want to try to do a good job even if the software they picked came from people who are just a few too many apples short of a full bushel.
I’m familiar with some of the people behind it and didn’t know that they had worked on Discourse and… well, they’re not “the moon landing never happened” out there, but they’ve got some weird-ass ideas about how to shape communities through UX. There’s validity to the idea that UX can influence things, but their approach to the whole process is pretty much “let’s try this and see what happens but also if anyone tells us we’re wrong, we won’t listen.”
I try to keep in mind that any person you see posting here from Unity is almost sure to have not been the one to actually make the boneheaded decisions that I’m annoyed with. They’re just doing their jobs and trying to make things the best they can. So it’s best to always treat them with respect (and, really, anyone you interact with online who hasn’t given you a reason not to).
I actually came here to make a post about how convoluted the alerts are. There are just so many settings to turn on and disable to try to get just what alerts are pertinent to us. Too many forums auto showing up in feed, and then important alerts like replies to threads we just posted in are getting buried.
I’ve had a few desktop popups with alerts for the forum, but never for anything important. A few key things making it a bit of a pain to engage with.
Anyhow, wasn’t sure how to make a post in this forum, so sliding this feedback in here while seconding that being able to make a post in the correct forum is an issue as well.
Feel bad for the Unity guys as there’s so much to wrestle with for Discussions, but solid progress being made every day!
Also my “latest topics” feed is getting taken over by a massive ammount of pinned posts and it’s hard to get any kind of reliable means of seeing new posts that i’m interested in:
You can unpin from the latest topics the pinned posts by clicking on the pin before the title, they will stay pinned in their relevant categories, but will unpin from the latest.
For the alerts, you can create custom links as you see fit, for example the posts you replied are all automatically watched, so you can create a custom link that shows only the topics you are watching that also have new posts, or a link that only shows you tracked posts, or only the new posts and so on…
Thing is I do unpin them but every day I’m hit in the face with a wave of new ones that I need to unpin.
Feels a little silly voicing these issues as theyr’e so very obvious, but I do think it does help to help give certain issues priority and at least make sure they are catalogued for later since they seem to be a bit of a skeleton crew trying to handle this huge task.
Yeah, you are correct, I just noticed the wave you are talking about, I hadn’t seen it because after the customization I hadn’t clicked the Latest topics link, I’m usually only clicking the first three categories of my post.
It’s becoming very hard to post in this forums feedback category because there is no contextual option for it. As more topics are posted, having to scroll down is becoming increasingly unwieldly.
Today I wanted to post something about Unity Version Control. It was the first time I dared post outside this Unity Discussions Feedback topic.
It… was rough. I couldn’t just go to the Unity-Version-Control tag and go down to the bottom and click to create a new one, because of the infinite scroll.
So instead, I was confronted with the New Topic button.
This button is incredibly unfriendly. It baffles me, and I’d consider myself a seasoned forum poster. I’d go so far as to say it’s not just unfriendly but is in fact inimical to conversation.
I did eventually figure out it’d go under Unity Services Topic. I then tried typing in the tag with “version” and was given the choice of “Unity-Version-Control” or “DevOps-Unity-Version-Control”. I know from experience that they throw “DevOps” into the name whenever they feel like it, and these are the same thing. I have no idea if they map to the same tag under the hood, but I know you as a user can choose on or the other. Why is this something a user needs to decide?
And if I’d originally clicked on General Discussion and thought to change
This only exists for a small handful of forum sections, the ones already on the dropdown. It’s also a known UX anti-pattern, if you’re already in a forum section the new topic button should always just create a new topic in that specific section. It’s how every forum has worked on the internet for almost three decades.
If someone goes to a specific forum section and clicks New Topic, there is a 100% chance they want to make a thread in that forum. Nobody ever wants to make a thread in a different section.
I’ve already seen people posting Discussions related feedback to Web Resources - Unity Discussions instead since it’s practically impossible to post here if you don’t know a link exists if you scroll to the very bottom of this section through 3 pages of existing posts. New Topic button should point straight to this section, don’t even need some selector, just post here if I’m in this section.
Since forum has now exited Beta status officially, and mentions Unity Discussions Feedback as the feedback loop in place - I need to remind powers that be that the feedback loop mentioned is ineffective if people can’t post here via New Topic button.
That same topic weirdly mentions to direct feedback to Web Resources using the Unity-Discussions tag. So which is it? Where do we actually leave feedback?
