Low-quality topics on Discussions

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21

Exactly. Over 10 years ago I started using Unity when I were attending a small game dev course. Most of my knowledge I acquired on my own over time. I mainly answered UA questions to impove my own knowledge. So someone asked an interesting question and I just went out to find the answer. I still have at least 5 Unity projects which literally hundreds of folders, each with different things I tested in Unity. Most were UA related. I usually even had an “UA” folder in many of my projects where I did quick tests of UA questions.

Recently I don’t had that much time for playing around with Unity, but I was active on UA on a daily basis. Though the quality of most questions has dropped significantly over the years. On top of that the number of bots increased heavily. The last years I didn’t answer much question but were only doing some moderation stuff. Flagging and banning spam bots (including every single post made by them) and reformatting posts which have failed to properly mark their code as code (I had the feeling that the fail-to-format-code-correctly rate has risen to 90+% :smiley: )

I also didn’t mind answering the same questions again, if the questions were of decent quality and actually explained and included all necessary information. Though lately we got more and more single line questions with titles like “help”. Though this wasn’t an UA exclusive thing. The forum also sees more and more such threads. Only a tiny portion of them get closed.

I know it’s difficult to automatically react to low efford posts. Maybe the editor could detect when people insert larger amounts of text that “looks like” code so the site can inform them how to properly insert code. I don’t like automatic “fixes” as they are usually too invasive and even when the faliure rate might be low, it’s not worth it. Just a warning / hint right after the insert may help.

3 Likes
22

So are all Answers gone now? Not even a archive available anywhere?

23

Answers became assimilated as legacy-topics tagged threads.

1 Like
24

My opinion is that we need what you may refer to as a “Discussions short-bus” for the lack of a better term.

The problem : people aren’t gonna read the FAQ and guidelines.
I didn’t even read them, i came here with a purpose, which is to ask questions, not to read guidelines and so did others, i have no incentive to read such guidelines.
(Let alone people come from different countries with different languages so its difficult for them to read guidelines and FAQs)

What we can’t do : We can’t ban them just because they don’t know how to post a question.

Downvoting doesn’t help anyone as well.

My proposal : another discussion page, with a tag : “Vague questions”, that is in a different URI such as discussions_vague / unity and is isolated from this place, as in, questions there will not appear here.
Have a janitor / “moderator” direct all the vague questions with some template answer : “This post was marked as vague and moved to another page”.

Just like you have special kids that you put in institution so they won’t bother anyone, same idea here, If you can’t post correctly, you can’t hang around with the adults and off you go to the kids table.

25

The great thing about Unity Answers is that it wasn’t a discussion.

2 Likes