We have rolled back the forum (you can read the rollback announcement thread here). Unfortunately, this means that the past week’s worth of content will not be accessible here. For any important content from last week, you can still access it on the read-only new-forum.
Outstanding items that we still need to work out for the rollback:
forum-old.unity3d.com URL is still displaying. This shouldn’t affect your usage, and links should work just fine. Let us know if this is not the case! We will be fixing this tomorrow CEST time.
Permissions weirdness - if anyone is getting strange permissions errors, or if you are unable to complete an action you were able to in the past, please let us know so we can look into this.
Now what?
With some amazing help from @Buhlaine , we are in the process of going through the new forum feedback thread et al and documenting everything so we can start prioritizing and all that good stuff.
Rest assured, we will not be making any changes w/o ample warning and feedback/testing from the community – we plan to reach out to many of you who have contributed feedback last week once we have something to test. Given the summer holiday period and all that we need to take on board, I do not expect any visible movement on a future upgrade in the immediate future.
Here is my suggestion, and this is coming from having to do this in my day job of migration and user feedback for new features:
Build a ‘steering committee’ of users that represent the target groups of Unity forums users. Get a couple of long time users, a couple of fairly new ones, several asset developers, and a couple of us middle of the road types. If they are also experienced in web development and understand servers to some extent, even better.
Build a list of features that are required for the ‘new’ forums and evaluate that the next architecture can even handle it. The amount of basic features missing or broken on Lithium was a complete disaster from the first post (without spellcheck).
Plan the migration and TEST TEST TEST TEST it over and over.
Communicate to everyone what is coming. I literally woke up to seeing a new forum without ever having seen it. Put a giant sticky modal popup on the old forum, send a newsletter, send a mailer to pro clients that you have the address of. Just get the word out.
Another item should be to take all of the info gleaned from the disaster rollout and make it an internal case study for how not to do things.
Yes, and get a real bastard on the team. I’m fairly dickish, so I can up the productivity anywhere if they’re looking for serious criticism. So hire me today and up yours!
I’m gonna disagree with this. This forum is a web-hosted app. Unity has on their servers reams of user data from the past decade as to how people actually use this forum every day.
That data enables Unity QA to instantly tell if the new forum works.
Before Unity even contemplates changing anything, make sure the top dozen or so use and UI flow cases and patterns are supported precisely the same way in the new forum. This rollout basically broke every single use pattern I used, and there was no clear replacement how to do anything that I used to do.
I applaud Unity for pulling down the disastrous forum rollout.
Thank you! The forum “upgrade” was a disaster. Not just the process, but the new forum software itself was just awful.
If you’re going to change to different forum software in the future, may I suggest the free/open http://discourse.org/ instead of whatever it was we just got rid of?
Most of the motivation is likely the technical support Lithium would have supposedly provided to Unity. Switching to a free and/or open source platform would be a step in the opposite direction for them. Lithium may have been a good alternative if they had taken the time to properly prepare it.
Yeah, that sounds great, although that’s only theory. As with any idea, most important is execution and the people behind it. You simply can’t craft a “big testing plan” if you simply can’t afford it because you’re not realistic in terms of people required to execute that plan or even detail that plan. Of course, what has happened with the new forum deployment is still embarrassing and completely disastrous from every perspective - will we just simply see a 100% turn around about what occurred and just expect everything will just work on the next try? Unity does not work that way sorry.
As publishers, we’re concerned about the usability and look of the forum, as it drives lot of traffic to the Asset Store. We don’t mind to participate or contribute to additional testing if necessary and for what we know, the future of Unity is built around this kind of collaboration (the open beta of future Unity versions for example). Obviously we expect a minimum review pass for the new forum system before pushing the new version out for public review of course, but honestly I don’t expect the new beta forum to be even a beta quality soon honestly, due to the amount of pending issues.
Just out of curiosity, is it written anywhere what the primary motivation for making a new forum is? The current one is actually pretty darn good, so I was wondering why you guys were looking at overhauling it in the first place.
Main motivation seemed to do with strategic long term needs, in which internal systems would be better connected and better analytics / data quality could be obtained across systems. It also was expected that the new platform itself provided better functionality than XenForo, but for what we have seen so far, it has resulted in the opposite direction.
Thanks for telling me what I may or may not suggest.
I have no idea what Stormfront is, and after looking around on discourse.org for a while, I see no mention of it. Furthermore, I don’t see how other people/sites/companies using the Discourse software in a way you don’t approve of has any bearing on how Unity would/could use it.
If they were going to pay Lithium for support, they can also choose to pay Discourse for support. But I don’t know all the details and intentions behind the forum upgrade.
I was just trying to suggest some software that seems like it would be much more user friendly than whatever it was we just got rid of. Which, based on your response was called Lithium?
In summary: From a software perspective, Discourse seems pretty good to me, and much better than the train-wreck software (Lithium?) we are still recovering from. I know next-to-nothing about the people/companies behind the software.
I’d say just take the Lithium forum out back and put it down, then try and find a way to keep the Xenforo forum while also getting what you want out of it.
It might be too late to consider any alternatives, but I don’t know why Unity didn’t go with something more flexible and open source like Drupal. I even seem to remember a job offer at Unity that mentioned Drupal experience, so it seems like they’re familiar with it? Heck, you could probably take the Drupal Commons or OpenLucius distribution and build something to replace most of the existing systems (blog, forums, answers, feedback, wiki, etc.) in just a few months. Something that could go far beyond a mere “community forum”.
For example, you could add a system that would give asset developers more control over their own asset threads. Allowing them to even create their own sub-forums, to help keep content more manageable and easier to organize for bigger assets. Connect forum discussions to the Asset Store, Made With Unity site, blogs, user profiles, etc. Of course it sounds like this is exactly what Unity is planning to do, but Lithium just doesn’t seem nearly as capable or flexible to me for the job. Also building all of these features out of a single system, seems much easier than trying to hookup multiple, yet perhaps similar, systems.
Get some people over 45 to test, people with eye issues, migraines, RSI (there are several different ones), color blindness, and whatever else I didn’t think about.
Get people on iphones, androids, netbooks, laptops with small screens, laptops with bigger screens, large monitors, small monitors, older and newer machines.
Get people who like to chat, like to post code, use the forums for business, use PM’s, and other things I didn’t think about.
Get people who want ignore buttons, ones who want less white space, ones who can make styles, ones who can’t…etc.
Make sure you fill your testing ranks with a lot of different people. I guess you can add this to BoredMormon’s list.
You’re lucky! It’s an infamous neo-nazi forum. If the devs have ties to that sort of community I don’t want UT using it. I think we’ll manage with XenForo, since it’s been the smoothest experience through the many software changes UT have made.