Product Areas vs Categories vs Tags

I’m still trying to fully understand how Product Areas, Categories, and Tags fit together. Is there a hierarchy, is it totally disconnected, or what? If you click on a Product Area, it says it “contains” certain tags. Like UI product area contains “Accessibility, Editor-UI, IMGUI, Localization, Text, TextMesh-Pro, UI, UI-Builder, UI-Toolkit, Unity-UI”. It has a lot more tags if you click the tag dropdown.

When you click the Discussions Home link, you’re taken to this:

This seems to have a mixture of Product Areas and Categories? Maybe some are Tags, too? Do tags cut across Product Areas and/or Categories?

Maybe it’s just me, but I find this whole organization very disorganized and confusing. Perhaps I’m just too set in my ways of the old forum, but I never really have a real sense of presence anywhere on this site. Hopefully this will improve with time.

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Heiarchy seems to be

    flowchart
         A(Categories)--> B( Product Areas) --> C(Tags);

Categories contain product areas which contain tags. But also categories can contain main forums not contained in product areas.

If you want, you can probably just focus on the categories page like you use to.

I think the current system is more designed to forcibly organize things.

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But where does one get to the list of categories to browse by category? On the home page, there’s a dropdown but it has just a few. Maybe that’s actually all there are? But they seem to really steer you towards the product areas.

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I note there is an “All categories” link under Quick Links on the left. But that just takes you back to

https://discussions.unity.com/categories

which is a mix of categories and product areas. I think this is a big part of what makes it feel so muddled to me.

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I found that list to be the most familiar to the Forums old section layout page. I think it’s basically there as comfort navigation.

I agree, hopefully everyone can get familiar with it. Definitely a transition.

I just ran into something else interesting when clicking on the Unity-Version-Control tag and clicking the [i] button:

So tags can span categories, but some (all?) tags are locked to only specific categories.

I don’t know exactly what it’s calling a “group” in that page. Devops is a Product Area, but Unity Services is a category. Maybe it’s using “group” to mean either of those.

I don’t think it cleanly maps to the hierarchy Categories > Product Areas > Tags.

Because looking at the 2D product area:
https://discussions.unity.com/lists/2d

You can see that some have the category of Unity Engine, others have the category Questions & Answers.

And even more confusingly, you have the 2D tag:
https://discussions.unity.com/tag/2d

Which gives you a somewhat different list of topics than the 2D category.

I just do not get the organization here.

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I’m still trying to fully understand how Product Areas, Categories, and Tags fit together.

Just take my approach and ignore everything but tags. You can mix multiple tags together but you can’t really do that with anything else.

https://discussions.unity.com/tags/intersection/2D/sprite-atlas

Maybe so. One of the things I tried to test was finding the Bakery asset support topic (the excellent baked lighting asset). Probably because I saw guycalledfrank’s earlier post in the forum thread. No tag for that. Hmm… now what? Just search for “bakery”. Nope “bakery asset”. Nope.

Google search “unity bakery asset”. Fourth hit (right after google’s stupid huge videos section). Click on that, and apparently it has tags Community Showcases
and Asset-Store-Assets.

Not sure I’d ever have found it in the search.

In my opinion, this is very confusing, check out some other sites that use the same forum engine. All of them are much more organized than this one. For example:

This might help

Product areas provide a similar function to the old forum areas and tags give a similar function to the sub forums.

edited to give a fuller explanation

In the old setup, we had fairly coarse-grained forums that would cover an area of the product, but there might be multiple different subjects people would talk about in that forum. For example, we had a single ‘2D’ forum that people could use to discuss sprites, tilemaps, 2D physics, etc; it was multiple different subjects being talked about, aggregated together into one forum. In some cases there was enough discussion about a specific subject that we set up sub-forums, to split the aggregation up.

In the new setup, we recognise each of those different subjects with tags, and the aggregation is done by what we call ‘product areas’ - predefined groups of tags that let you quickly see topics about related subjects in some part of the product. The old 2D forum contained discussions about sprites, tilemaps, 2D physics, etc - and the new 2D product area contains topics tagged with ‘sprite’, ‘tilemap’, ‘2D physics’, etc.

A topic can now appear in multiple product areas. In the old forum, if you wanted to ask about 2D physics, you might find yourself wondering whether to post in the ‘2D’ forum or in the ‘Physics’ forum. In the new setup, both the 2D and Physics product areas can include the ‘2D Physics’ tag and your topic will show up in both aggregations.

Does that help at all?

Some possibly useful info

On home page the tags under the main headers are selectable so you can jump directly to the filtered listing ( similar to how you could click a subgroup in the old Site)

You can also click the relevant tag under a post it will filter if you don’t want to use the drop down or add it to your personalised tag menu in the sidebar then you have a quick link direct to it

Where can I find the full list of categories to browse?

On the home page, there’s a dropdown menu with only a few categories. Are those the only categories available, or is there a more comprehensive list hidden somewhere? It seems like the site mostly directs users to product areas.

Not sure I’d ever have found it in the search.

Advanced search has the option to search topics by who has posted them. Alternatively you can use “@guycalledfrank”. Here’s the search that I tried and the support thread was the third entry.

https://discussions.unity.com/search?expanded=true&q=%40guycalledfrank%20Bakery%20order%3Alatest_topic

Yes, but if you have to explain it for people to understand, then the design is not intuitive. People coming to these forums are not going to be presented with an explanation first.

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Yes, but if you have to explain it for people to understand, then the design is not intuitive. People coming to these forums are not going to be presented with an explanation first.

To be fair most people coming to the old forums for the first time couldn’t figure it out either. We had a large number of support request threads being posted in “General Discussion” despite the fact that it was clearly marked “this is NOT a support forum”. Additionally I’ve had less than a month with this platform and I’m not struggling. So if anything I feel like it’s the fault of the user as much as if not moreso the platform.

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Only if I remembered exactly what their username was. In fact, I actually misremembered it as guynamedfrank at first. :joy: