This has been an issue I’ve been wanting to discuss since the first time I used the unity forum search, and hopefully after the right people read this they will be able to fix it. After you click on the ‘search’ link and enter what you want to search for, your search results come up (this all works fine), if you click on any topic that came up for your particular search you are unable to get back to the page where your search results are, if you press the back button on the web browser it always says the page is broken or something. I have tried this at home and at work on multiple web browsers and always get the same results.
So in other words when doing a search every time I click on a certain topic in the search results I must go all the way back to the search menu and re-enter in what I want to search for to get back to the search results that I had previously. This is a pain in the neck!
Wow thanks what a cool trick! For those who want to search just the forum put this into the google search engine. site://forum.unity3d.com
For now I will use this, but I still wouldn’t mind if the search engine on the forum was fixed
You can also just reload the broken page. Just hit the reload button (shortcut F5 on windows) after hitting back, and it will reload the search results for you.
Although after saying that, I think I’ll be trying the reply from Quietus.
To improve the overall quality of questions, I’d suggest to create a sub-forum for each component of unity: physics, sound, asset server, networking, terrain, plugins, editor enhancements, etc…
Splitting discussions over those areas would be an improvement of quality in itself. Currently 90% of questions about physics, asset importing, etc are to be found in “Scripting”.
I would also suggest to create some specific sub sections within those sub-forums (yes… some BB software out there allow the creation of sub-sub-forums) such as Graphics->Shaders, Graphics->Asset import, Graphics->Umbra, Sound->Asset Import, Sound->Processing, Scripting->Editor Enhancements, Scripting->Physics, …
The problem I see with the sub-sub-forum suggestion is that it means if I want to help someone I have to keep updated on many more forums. Right now I have 4-5 pages to check for new stuff I’ve not seen that I may be interested in. With your idea I could have upwards of 30 different places to look to assist someone. I’m just not going to look, and someone won’t get help.
It’s good to bundle all the people that could help you into one forum because they are more likely to see it.
That doesn’t work. I constantly see collaboration requests in the scripting section, shader questions in the support forum, etc.
Hell there was even one guy last month I got a chuckle out of. He posted a gui question in the multiplayer section…because his game would eventually be multiplayer.
one of the reason for this is the forum engine used are way too old(phpbb v2.x),if unity goes into commercial solution like ipb/vbulletin it would be more search-able as the indexing on these forum more good based on my own experience.
Otherwise I would just suggest that subjects should be tagged within a general Unity Support forum. Tags such as Physics, Animation, etc… would appear next to the subject lines.
I also really like a forum that gives the first line or so of the post body within the alt tag of the subject link. The Blender Artists Forum is a good example. http://blenderartists.org/forum/
I think Higgy said in that recent live video interview that changes will be coming to the site eventually. =) Hopefully they address these issues.