Original post from June 10
On June 23rd, Unity Answers will be shut down permanently and will be redirected to the Unity Forums. Before shutting down, Unity Answers will enter read-only mode on Monday the 13th.
The content that was hosted on Unity Answers will no longer be publicly available after the shutdown on the 23rd of June. This includes discussions and user profile information. We will evaluate migration options after the shutdown but can’t currently commit to any migration work at this stage.
The Forums are the primary community platform for asynchronous support, insightful discussions, and information about Unity. For those looking for realtime conversations and fast responses, you can also find help from the community in our Official Discord.
Activity on Unity Answers has been declining for a long time, and while the Forums do not currently offer Unity Answers’ functionality of highlighting accepted answers, they already serve the same purpose of finding answers to questions more effectively due to their increased response rate. Closing Answers will allow us to focus our resources and improve the user experience of our community platforms in the long run.
We are working on adjustments in the Forums to help with this transition and will share our plans in the following weeks to open them up to your feedback.
We recognize that Unity Answers didn’t receive the support from our side that would have been required to help it scale with Unity’s growth, and we apologize for taking so long to act in this matter, especially to the community members and moderators who supported Answers until now. Thank you for your engagement and effort.
Hiding the content seems a bit excessive. There is plenty of useful information on Unity answers for beginners. When you search for a Unity-related issue, there’s usually a Unity answer result high up with the solution. It would be a shame if all of that went away!
OTOH a lot of the answers on Unity answers are outdated, more so than answers on the forum. In particular within the past 3-4 years. Still, the occasional gem exists. Would be great to save the top 100 most frequented answer threads, even if it were a plain copy & paste into gist or forum threads.
Sounds like a bad idea to completely take it offline. Make it read only with a warning about outdated content would IMO a better solution. I found many valuable information there, which all would be gone all of the sudden. Having that much content is one of the biggest strength of Unity compared to competition.
Unity Answers may contain a lot of low quality advice that is often outdated but such short notice without clear alternative or migration plan seems very impulsive and short sighted. The transition period is effectively one bussiness day which seems to be extremely short time span from “we’re sunsetting a service announcement” to “it’s locked now”.
Google is full of links that will become dead in 2 weeks which will be terrible for new users because there are some good responses and useful code snippsets there that will be wiped out without trace. This will lead to a lot of frustration if you don’t leave read-only copy beyond those 2 weeks.
Please don’t delete the entire content – it’s a database of hundreds of thousands of posts, and sounds like the plan is for it to just disappear forever. I’m sure the Internet Archive would be interested in helping preserve the content in one way or another if you reached out to them.
It’s true that some of the content is old, but it has still been a very valuable resource to me almost every day since its inception. Is it so costly that you really must shut it down? I feel like this is a real hit to community resources. Forums are not set up for finding answers the same way-- I hate trying to find what I’m looking for on forums, and for all the valuable content to disappear, it shakes my trust in Unity’s commitment to providing resources. Please provide reassurance that the valuable time and energy the community put into helping each other will not be destroyed.
Please just create a way to make in message on thread to be Question ans second message to be accepted answer and even compilation of all useful answer pieces from entire thread so newcomers can just read first 2 messages and get short compilation of entire thread.
Additionally allow for voting for good candidates to second Answers message
Just wonder how it can be helpful for threads where users disscuss something and Unity answer just once per Month
so having short QnA in second message will be super helpful
I’d think a complete shutdown would hurt investors views more than the cost of running the service. When I go to Unity Answers I see activity every 10 minutes.
It’d be nice to know what steps were attempted to trim the costs of running Unity Answers before it was decided to be shutdown.
Well this is unfortunate, but perhaps understandable given the state of the platform. Unity documentation has improved, but I still find the clearest (and sometimes only) answers on Answers fairly regularly. I will miss being able to find my own responses there, as I occasionally stumble upon my own previously gleaned knowledge () that’s more usable and concise than Unity docs, and much more discoverable than forums. One example I looked up just today is How to limit frame rate in Unity Editor - Questions & Answers - Unity Discussions… goodbye old friend!
It’s a shame there can’t be some sort of migration to Stack Overflow or similar. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Unity Answers hold a lot of valuable information for the developers and there are a lot of answers that are code related which doesn’t get outdated.
Please remove all questions without any answers and leave the rest as read only. This way we’ll be able to continue using that source of information since a lot of the answers cannot be found anywhere else.
Sad to see.
For me, answers was always more productive than forums, but even more than that I wanted a single place to go, so I’m in favor of consolidation. Keeping the content public would be huge win, imo.
so, can we copy existing script snippets from the site and archive them into github?
also,
since its going to break thousands of good answer links inside the forum posts,
why not just make it read-only, and keep it running for at least few years more?
then at least the knowledge would be still available when googled,
and in the forums could start copying the answers into posts itself, whenever find solution from answers site, during the read-only period…