[meta] Approval process changes

All -

I am tired telling new users that they need to spend a little time learning how to format their code, or spending my time formatting code for people. I’m going to get ruthless at just rejecting questions where the user hasn’t put any effort into their question. The FAQ is pretty explicit about what people need to do. Obviously I know many new users don’t read the FAQ, or spend time searching on Google or Answers. Grrr. And it’s unfortunate that the messaging system on Answers isn’t activated, so users who’s question is rejected won’t know why.

If anyone can think of improvements to the FAQ, please suggest them. Or, if anyone has got good suggestions for why my new moderation style is crazy, let me know,

Thanks!

For me, so far Unity Answers hasn’t been as helpful as just asking on Stack Exchange. Especially for a new user to Unity and to UA who has only 1 point.

I’m constantly googling and trying to find Unity answers that are probably trivial to some. And sometimes when I’m bored I look through the questions on Stack Overflow and the Game Development Stack Exchange and answer questions if I can. I’m not a super user on either but I do have enough points to use the site properly. I’m not a noob at coding or a noob at game development. But my experience is in open gl. I’ve only been using C# and Unity for about a month. And a lot of stuff in Unity is foreign to me right now.

A few weeks ago I posted a couple of questions, figured the issues out on my own, and then deleted them while they were still waiting for moderation. One was something that stopped happening when I quit and relaunched mono develop. I think the other was too broad of a question. So I felt it was better to just delete them. Because of this I didn’t see how long they were going to last in a mode of waiting for moderation. But it seemed like at least several hours if not overnight.

But this weekend I asked a question that in my opinion was fine. Very typical of what would be asked on SE. In fact, once I realized that it was going to be in moderation for a while and not knowing how long it would take, I reposted it to SE Game Dev and asked it there as well.

30 minutes later someone on SE was giving a thoughtful answer and trying to help me understand. Within an hour or so I had 2 possible ways of doing what I was trying to do. And later that evening I put one of them in to action, and learned a lot in the process. Got my code working!! Isn’t that the goal?

But my version of the question here got rejected with no visible explanation.

If there was no SE I would STILL be trying to figure out how to accomplish that thing. How is that good for Unity as a company or for the community of people trying to learn how to use Unity?

In my opinion, you need to loosen up a little and give people some grace. Let the community moderate a little bit. Because when I look around on UA I see a ton of people with little or no points. I see a lot of answers with no votes. And it appears to be because it’s too hard to get points. If I ask a fairly legit question here, one that on SE was taken seriously and someone viewed and gave some thought to. One that someone answered there and the answer helped me. If I’m not allowed to ask that same question here - how will I ever get points. And if I can’t enough points to vote up an answer - why would I contribute to this site? Not to mention how is that going to help someone else who has that same question?

Don’t you want the community to contribute? Or would you rather have a site that is so strict that no one can use it or be human enough to show themselves vulnerable? To me SO / SE are working really well. And UA just isn’t. I don’t even know if I’m wasting my time right now as I’m sure THIS answer will go in to moderation and possibly rejected. But this is a legit answer to your question:

If anyone can think of improvements to
the FAQ, please suggest them. Or, if
anyone has got good suggestions for
why my new moderation style is crazy,
let me know,

Your new moderation style IS crazy because it cuts the site off at the knees. And I think maybe it’s harder on NEW users and not so hard on established users with points. Not sure. I just know that for me right now the way things are I see no reason to ask questions here. And to me that’s bad for UA and bad for Unity. Because in a welcoming environment I am potentially a contributing user.

There has to be some middle ground between what is happening now and whatever wild wild west thing was happening before. Don’t just reject questions out right. SO marks them first. Then the user has a chance to reword the question. Then eventually they get rejected. I’ve saved people from bad questions before. Helped them ask it a better way and answered it. Because I could see what they were really trying to ask when the moderator couldn’t.

Hi,

i think people found it annoying to search for rules how to ask a question, especially when they want post the question realy quick.

A improvement could be made by adding a slider to the Site, so that everyone can see the important rules directly. Split the rules into multiple slides, so that the user gets not slayed by the amount of text.
Just put the important informations into this section and make a reference to the full FaQ site.

e.g.:

Hi all, I only started trying to help people recently and must admit that I struggled with formatting my code at first due to a problem with my Firefox browser. Everything I read said press the 101010 button, what button… I did not have any buttons.
I then tried various things to get it to format before switching to Google Chrome, at which point all these buttons everyone was talking about magically appeared.

On the whole I agree with this stance, I struggle to read badly formatted code and inevitably have to paste it into my editor and reformat the lot before I can do anything, which is a pain.
However if there is a way for you to see how many posts someone has made then I would urge leniency towards those who are below a certain amount, especially as the system to inform them why their question has been removed is not fully functional.

On a different note it seems that may people who have received the information that they need fail to close their question successfully, not even a thanks in some cases. More importantly with this issue is the lack of any indication for a definitive answer(at a glance, some posts end up being very lengthy) when searching through the Q and A’s for an answer.
Maybe if there was some sort of limit to the number of open questions that users can have at any one this might be less of an issue…
Just a thought, cheers.

(PS : I know this is an old post but it had popped up in the 1st page list and upon reading it it still seemed very relevant…)

“If anyone can think of improvements to the FAQ, please suggest them.”

I’m not saying I disagree on what makes a good question, but if you read the FAQ, it’s doesn’t say any of that. It seems to have been written when the worry was not enough traffic. The three “rules” are very wide open (and they say duplicates are allowed!): 1) detailed and specific, 2) written clearly and simply, 3) of interest to at least one other Unity user somewhere.

“Can someone write this script for me (with long list of requirements)?” meets all three. “Why is this code throwing error 706” meets 1 and 2, and sort of meets 3 (if I got the error, someone else probably will.)

In the Guidelines, they merely suggest many Q’s are really 2 parts (gui toggle to change skybox ex,) but “no 2-part Q’s” isn’t a rule. Super rough FAQ rewrite, in no special order:

o Avoid genre-specific questions, such as “red screen for horror game.” You’ll get better results if you reword as “tint entire screen.”

o If you’re just stating with Unity, there is a lot to learn. Most of the problems you’ll have early on are solved by reading the many “How to use Unity” topics. We don’t mean to be rude, but it’s the best way we know to explain things.

o We don’t specifically support other people’s tutorials. We’re a little sensitive if it sounds like our job is to fix everything on the internet :slight_smile:

o C# is common language outside of Unity. Which means that many questions about using C# can be solved by looking them up in the regular internet.

o Before posting script error questions, please read the intro to scripting errors guide [note: is there anything now which is good enough for this?]

o Before posting script-not-working questions, use general debugging tricks to isolate the problem. Try to get it down to one line that you know is running (because you print just before it,) but it isn’t doing what the manual says it should.

o Many questions about textures or 3D models have to do with the program that made them. You can often find good answers on photoshop/gimp/max/maya/blender sites.

o Questions about games made with Unity are best asked on the game-maker’s site. This site is mainly for people using the Unity3D editor to make games.

o [repeat the “gui toggle to change skybox” ex, about breaking a Q into parts.]

Writing is hard and it’s very difficult to get the right “try to meet us halfway” tone. And, a lot of the things we think new users should be seeing are a little bit hidden now, or aren’t as good as we thought.

I didn’t have any complications about the style of approving question .
You need to read faq that’s really good .
But my question about null reference is now copied from anyone . It looks strange for me by changing camera and getting error while it will instantiate the fire when enemy collide so i tried like always in answers.unity and know i got my time waste again just putting it to copied list (i am not angry ,no i can’t,i never be for these small reasons but i need to change out the whole design of my game , a little bit disappointing for me) and i didn’t get how to solve that .So i think with topics headings you need to checkout a little bit in the description . Now i deleted that question .
I don’t think so single moderator can really read each second of question so unity need some partners (just a suggestion) ,Hope i didn’t said anything that hurt you for any reason .
and thanks for doing the hard work .

i think the criteria shouldnt be that questions meet your formatting standards, i think the criteria should be if the question is understandable. Ive had questions rejected with only two lines of code, which required no scrolling. And i even had a link to a unity document that explained the code i was trying to implement. if its harder to ask a question than it is to answer one, people will ask less questions.