I have had dramatically better experiences on non-Unity dev forums, such as various subreddits and tigsource. Tigsource is a great example because they’re yet another bunch of people who do active community management. I’ll break it down. Here’s what you see when you land on the tigsource forums:
The first think you see is the community landing subform, Townhall. This is basically the tigsource equivalent to General Discussion. Next up, you have the WIP subforum. These are two simple things that dramatically change the way a community works. I’ll bring up the Unity forums next:
The first thing we’ve got are Announcements. This is… bad? And kinda ridiculous? Announcements should be a subforum of General Discussion (as should Meta-Forum Discussions, if I’m being real) because there’s not a lot of reason for an announcements forum to have top priority in the listings.
Next is Getting Started. I think this is actually a great place for that! In fact, I think a better place for it would be the first listing. The second listing should be General Discussion, because that’s going to be the general community landing. Immediately you present two things in doing this: you have created an immediate spot, first on the list, for new people to post inquiries; with General Discussion being the next one, you’ve fostered a sense that there is a community, instead of burying it all the way at the ass-end of nowhere.
Back to tigsource. Notice how high up their WIP forum is compared to Unity’s? If you want to foster a sense of community, another great thing to do is make it so that interaction with other members isn’t buried entirely. This is a game engine, yeah? We should probably have a higher priority showing what people are working on. Also, instead of tags, Asset Store WIP threads should get their own forum, or maybe a subforum of the Asset Store forum. Or, since a not insignificant amount of WIP assets are also on the asset store, maybe have a WIP tag in the Asset Store forum. There’s a dramatic difference between “game developer community looking at each other’s games” and "game developer community looking at each other’s tools."
Back to Unity. Let’s take a look at the next offender, Teaching and Certification. I single this out as a big offender because of this:
If I scroll down so that only the labels at the top of the Community Learning forum are on display, I can only see three unpinned threads (you may be able to see four, I have my tab bar at the bottom of the screen and it changes the real estate a bit). This is kinda messed up! That’s not a forum, that’s an LCD billboard. This is like the General Discussion issue from a couple years back where there were over a dozen pinned threads here. Some of these things shouldn’t be pinned at all and some of them should probably be archived somewhere. I don’t think anyone would lose any sleep if there was an Archived Threads (threads, not forums) forum for this sort of thing.
Okay, back to tigsource again. We can ignore Audio and Art because those two things are far more general than Unity as a forum should be. They’re not about technical implementations, they’re about the creative aspect. It’s important to note that tigsource is a generalist forum when it comes to gamedev, after all. Playtesting and Design could probably be merged into a Design forum and a Playtesting subforum. Right now the closest thing to playtesting is Feedback Friday in the Game Design forum, and that has to be directly run by community members.
If Game Design wasn’t totally buried, this may be less of an issue, but another couple things that might be nice is if there was any sort of Unity presence there and if there was a clear delineation between game design and game architecture. I swear, every time I go there I see something like how to paint a texture or what kind of architecture to use and these are more vague technical questions. Questions about vague technical things that don’t fall into Scripting, etc. should probably go somewhere like General Discussion or Getting Started.
And speaking of the Scripting forum, why is it halfway down the forum listings? It’s the most common way people will be engaging with Unity on a technical level outside of the Editor itself. This shit? This is all part of community building and management. Layout is more important than you can imagine because there is no justifiable reason for the forums to provide the level of friction they do when it comes to actual community interaction, and only slightly more justifiable reason for places like the Game Design forums and other less technical forums to have such a lacking presence from Unity.
Yeah, I’m not done. Back to tigsource because I want to talk about another one of their forums that’s great for community: Jams & Events. Now, should Unity be hosting game jams? Yeah, actually, that might be a pretty good thing! When I was an active member on gamedev.net a million billion years ago, before engines like Unity were even a thing, game jams were seasonal events, often having things like prizes people would actually want. New GPUs sometimes, software licenses, various books back when books were a thing, gift certificates, that sort of thing.
And you know what? Those jam threads were usually some of the most active on the forums because loads of people were getting involved. They usually lasted two weeks to a month, ran four times a year max, and brought out everyone. On top of that, another way to build a sense of community would be to allow people on the forums to promote their own jams, just like they do there. On top of that, tigsource also allows for user event posts, which can range from offline meetups to just, well, other forms of social stuff and general light competition.
What Unity does is not just take an exceptionally passive role with the community and it doesn’t work. If it did work, we’d see things like a lot more community growth instead of stuff like “user registers, makes two posts, leaves.” These forums are treated as a means to an end by Unity, which is one of many reasons I don’t really think they have any business in “building up safe and healthy game communities.”
Damn, sure would be weird if I literally never said the thing you’re implying here.
Yes, I need something to do while my projects import and/or build or while I’m on the toilet.