Rather than the content vanishing, migrating it somewhere under Archived Forums or have Archived Answers?
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Even if you have some secret stats / analytics that shows Unity Answers are less visited than the forums or something, the psychological damage of deleting the communityās knowledge base without any migration or archival plan is just breathtaking. Morale is already flatlining among Unity devs, and now youāre doing this, with two weeks notice and zero plan? Talk to your users lol whatās wrong with you
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This decision makes absolutely no sense. Iāve used Unity for almost a decade and I still reference Unity Answers multiple times daily. at least archive it, my god
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This decision makes no sense. Please keep it read-only with a warning that the content may be outdated. All the top search results for Unity questions will lead to broken links if you kill Answers. It will be very frustrating specially for newcomers, not to mention how sad it is to see all that knowledge that people gave freely to each other just be erased forever. This is not the way to treat your community. Please listen: all the comments under this announcement are negative. May be the last push I needed to give Godot a try 
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This makes zero sense to me, what do you gain from hiding years of answered questions? Just make them read-only.
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If your analytics are showing low activity, perhaps that means people found their answers and left satisfied? That should be a good thing. Unity Answers has been much more helpful to me than the forums have over the years, at the very least.
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Shutting down Answers and redirecting the URL to the forum will - inevitably - bring a surge of new beginners asking beginner questions. And we all know all too well how newbies here are usually frowned upon by regular users. With Answers going away completely, they will have a way less to ājust google itā.
Not sure if thatās a good idea.
.
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One look at social media and you can immediately see how many developers think this is not a great step to take. There are still many answers on Unity Answers that continue being useful to this day that barely have any coverage or mention on the documentation.
While I understand the appeal of moving the functionality to the forums, thereās a lot less SEO and easy-to-find answers that you can get in the forums when youāre just sticking whatever you need into Google. And while I love Discord for community building, itās in no way a good platform to get support or find answers without massive overlap.
Disable the functionality and put Unity Answers in read-mode alright, but keep it as an accessible website rather than burning down a decade-long library of answers that continue being very accessible and friendly to new and veteran devs alike.
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This!
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I wish I could upvote this multiple times
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This is a wildy bad idea. Iāve been a unity developer for more than 10 years, and unity answers has been invaluable throughout that - there are so many bizarre edge cases in the unity API that the documentation doesnāt even begin to cover that are incredibly well covered in unity answers.
Itās a format thatās not been beaten - thereās a reason StackOverflow has become so popularā¦ because itās the best format for this kind of questions.
The forums have even more outdated information than unity answers. If you delete unity answers, everyoneās google searches are going to lead them to painfully out of date answers instead.
Out of date answers on unity answers could be flagged, or newer more accurate answers can be edited in, or upvoted to become the top answers
Even if people bumped ancient forum threads, people arenāt going to dig through pages of answers to find the most recent one
What problem does this solve? How does this improve anything? Why on earth are you doing this?
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At least make all the answers by @Bunny83 available. Learned a lot from such high quality answers!
Is there no way forward in regards to an archive? I think it is worth some thought. Itās a minor amount of work for an engineer and Unity can outsource this work cheap.
You knowā¦ I used a bit of https://www.flipcode.com/ the other day. Makes you think.
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This is a VERY bad idea, you are shooting your own foot.
At least make it a read-only archive but hiding what is a big part of what makes unity easy to use is a crazy move.
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Unity Answers was invaluable for me to learn the ropes in Unity quickly, much more so than the Unity Forums (and donāt get me wrong, the forums are useful!).
Unity isnāt a social network. How could one possibly justify hiding and deleting customer value like this? Whoever thought decreasing activity is an indicator of decreasing value needs to sit down and seriously reconsider their definition of success, and the damage caused by not committing to - at a minimum - preserving a useful repository of knowledge as an archive.
I would prefer to think of deleting useful things with inadequate warning - despite significant utility - as a misstep and mistake, rather than a bad habit of Unity, or rather than a sign it intends to pivot towards moving fast and breaking things.
Please donāt disappoint us. Please keep the answers site available, as an archive at least.
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I donāt know about this one, chief.
Vanishing an archive like that sounds like a kick in the gut to the community to be fair.
If the goal trying to avoid missleading caused by how old the threads are, just display a big warning message on top of every thread informing about it, but I think removing Unity Answers would be a huge mistakeā¦
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Wow terrible decision. At least leave it read only and archived. Tonnes of valuable information will be lost especially for beginners.
Unity Answers has been invaluable to me learnt so much from it.
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Before you do that, I hope you do realize that answers.unity.com > docs.unity3d.com . For something like a decade Answers + Forum were the only useful documentation we had.
Programmers write code and google search - remove top 20% of useful google search results (which often means Answers) and you will cut productivity by considerable margin for many in this cohort.
Forums offers no equivalent as it has, structurally by design, very different purpose. Multi-page List<Comment> facilitate long conversations/monologues where as Tree<Comment> are easier to sort and organize.
Discord is a āclosed gardenā-type chat room where search is pointless and an answerās lifespan is counted in minutes to hours, not years.
Stackoverflow is an actively hostile place toward newcomers.
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At least make it read-only until you find a better solution. And to be completely honest, i have not much faith in this ābetter solutionā, sorry. Anyone remember Unity Connect? I had to google it to remember the name or if this even happened. Job boards work, UA works, donāt break it for no reason.
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Iām really shocked, Iām studying to be a game developer, and the unity answers have been not just only useful, but essential.
I tried to read the documentation, but the most useful has always been the forums.
I cannot believe there isnāt going to be a migration of the data or just a warning saying be careful it may be out of date. Iāve visited many answers from years ago, that even though they werenāt very up to date they pointed me into the right direction, gave me a good explanation of small and concrete concepts.
A complete reset Itās not a bad decision, but a stupid one.
Many people are going to have problems because of this. Specially beginners, but also seniors that just donāt remember a specific thing, or itās not their field of expertise.
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This is a terrible execution of a poorly thought-out plan.
Random programmer: āSo what are we doing about UA?ā
Manager: Leans back in chair and thinks for five seconds
Manager: āCan we make it so people canāt post any more?ā
Programmer: āRead-only? We donāt have that functionality currently. We could add it but it might take a couple of weeks.ā
Manager: āHmm. Can we just trash it instead?ā
Thatās actually what I think must have happened. No more than five minutesā thought. Otherwise thereās no way they could have come to the conclusion that the best plan is to throw it all in the garbage.
It sounds like they looked at the number of posts as the only statistic for whether Answers should remain. By all means make it read-only if interactions are low, but ditching the entire site with no plan for migration? Wtf? Answers does what Stack Overflow does, which is provide answers to FAQs. The forum is horrible for that (which is precisely why Q&A sites exist). I donāt interact on Answers much, but I frequently find answers there.
I even have a personal stake in Answers. Iām horrified that Unity would just decide to trash all my work and the discussions we had to improve that answer. I have no problem with making it read-only, but it cannot possibly cost that much to keep it online. In fact I work for a company that runs multiple websites. I know how much it costs, and thereās no way in hell that cost isnāt a drop in the ocean to a company the size of Unity.
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