On February 28th the Feedback website will shut down and be redirected to the Unity forums. This will be the primary source of community feedback until we’re able to get a new, more scalable, and dedicated feedback solution in place (more details on that in the coming months). The forums are a great place for discussion, ideation, and inspiration between community members and Unity team members.
Feedback submitted by you, the community, is a primary driver in the success of the Unity platform. Over the years, you have volunteered your time to ensure that Unity becomes the best it can be and for that we thank you.
The Feedback website was our initial foray into an organized method of feedback collection. At the time, we were a smaller company with less visibility into the wants and needs of the community. The Feedback website served its initial purpose well, but was not created with scalability in mind.
Community feedback is highly prioritized and we will always continue to value it. It comes to us from the forums, social media, customer support, in-person events…everywhere - and that is what makes the Unity community so great.
Can you do this for Answers too? It’s been so poorly maintained for so long that it’d probably be best to archive it and direct everyone to the forums instead.
When doing Google searches, Answers has an easy way to tell what the solution is because it’s at the top of the page and is marked green. Finding solutions on the forums involves trawling through pages of irrelevant posts to find that one post that might be the solution. In the last year of LOTS of Googling (because I’m a new user), Answers has provided me the solution 9 out of 10 times. The forums have failed pretty hard at this.
I have a different experience. It’s not that I haven’t found solutions in Answers, but I have found plenty more in the forums, and, above all, usually more in-depth responses, from many more people, and from Unity devs in some cases.
The problem would be that you’d lose the votes system, and I suspect it could end up being a bit of an unorganized mess, difficult for Unity to handle. I personally think it’s a good idea to move it to its own space.
About time! I’ve always felt that interacting with Unity devs through the forums has been a lot more productive than interacting with the feedback site.
@Buhlaine , will you take a round of taking feedback on, uh, the feedback? You apparently understand that it’s not a good solution anymore, but we’d love to talk with you about how you’re doing feedback.
I have created a few feedback items that are important to me. Should I create forum threads for these feedback items now, or is the feedback content automatically migrated to forum threads?
If I should create new forum threads for those feedback items, is there a dedicated feedback forum?
Thanks for asking, we’re open to feedback on how you feel the forums can best be suited for feedback. You can leave those suggestions here and I can promise you it will get in front of the right eyes.
In the future, when we have our dedicated and scalable solution, we’ll let everyone in the community know and you’ll of course be welcome to provide feedback then as well!
At the moment we’re working to extract all of the existing content on the Feedback website and keep it internally, so your feedback items are not vanishing.
We find that a lot of extremely valuable feedback is funneled through all different channels in the forum, whether it be a specific subforum for beta feedback, or content in our general discussion areas. We’re currently suggesting that any threads created for the purpose of direct feedback be tagged with the “feedback” tag so our team can find it easily.
Good work @Buhlaine glad to see the already healthy forum go further like this, best put all the ideas on the same place. However I think it might be a nice idea to remind unity staff that it’s 100% super okay if they disable private messages because it’s with a heavy heart I heard from one staff member that they got abuse from some sour individuals in the past via PMs, and had to stop posting.
So if it will encourage staff to post more, I feel they should be reminded that it’s really 100% okay to turn that off in their options if they choose to, and everyone would understand.
When discussions are public, they’re much safer obviously.
Not at all, why would they be? If Unity is in the position to work on 5 features, and one of them has 100 votes more than the others, they know there’s more people interested in that one, so they can give it preference. That’s the actual utility of votes, not making Unity do things that they don’t want or aren’t ready to.
Now, of course, if Unity said “we don’t give a shit about votes”, then yeah, they would be useless. But until shown the opposite, I have to assume they are using them.
Pffff, that’s sad… I would definitely implement a complete and immediate block of PMs to devs and moderators, if they end up not wanting to post anymore it’s a big loss.
Except they categorically were not doing this at all. Feedback has had loads of things, some of them very obvious quality of life improvements, that have absolutely languished despite having thousands of votes. The votes are meaningless.
With engine development, you don’t actually need votes. Unity already knows what everyone wants. People have told Unity for over a decade.
So the move to just talking about what unity can do right now and is working on right now is actually logical. Voting for a new feature makes no sense because what is needed is fairly deterministic.
Well, I have seen them say in several occasions that votes are useful for them, are they lying? Maybe they are, I don’t know, but I think you are using your subjective perception, based on anectotal data, to imply something that may or may not be true.