This is something I’ve had on my mind for a bit recently and I was wondering if there had been any discussion about it at all. If you look at many of the topics many of the forums, especially Scripting, they’re definitely of a beginner nature. Has UTech ever considered adding a beginner section to these forums? Given that Unity is free, extremely easy to download and jump into it makes sense that lots of beginners get started quickly and run into problems quickly. Bear in mind this suggestion should not been seen as an attempt to demean beginners in any way at all—if anyone looks at some of my really old forum posts, I definitely fitted into that category once. There are likely many people who started out as extreme beginners but have turned into superb members of the community.
Reasons in favour of this could be:
Filter all ‘beginner’ threads into a single forum, causing other subforums to move slower. More advanced topics tend to take longer to resolve as they often require the attention of users with extensive experience in specific topics, so it’s better for them if they sit around on the first page of the forum longer.
Less intimidating for beginners by having a specific section, with stickies dedicated to resources to get started maybe? Could also encourage other new users to help each other which I think is great for learning.
Reasons against I can think of are:
Topics would no longer be always sorted into their proper forum, which could cause two issues: one would be that you could not longer search the Networking forum (for example) and get ALL topics related to networking, and the second being that the topic might not get exposure to certain users that frequent those specific forums.
Questions from beginners aren’t necessarily only for beginners. I learn new things about Unity all the time. I recently went through the beginner and intermediate scripting tutorials just for fun and picked up some interesting things.
Those are really the pros and cons I can think of, but I’d be interested in hearing other opinions, since some programming related forums I’ve frequented have had a beginner section and some have not.
Somewhat on topic, I think if you post any sort of code in your topic and don’t put it in code tags some big red alarm should go off or something.
