I’ve got quite a decent reputation on Unity Answers, and it is somewhat meaningful to me. But as I love to answer questions for users, I hate to get comments, or no picked answer/solution for questions that are answered at all. I am not concerned with whether my answers are selected as an answer, it just bugs me to see questions that have been answered weeks, months, or years ago that don’t get any recognition at all for having a solution, because the users who post questions simply forget, don’t know how, or they don’t care.
I would like to suggest some ideas that would be GREAT for Unity Answers:
Users who post questions will be notified with a dialog when logged in, if there is at least 1 answer, and none have been selected as an answer, similar to, “You have several questions that have not been solved! Please do so by clicking [Here].”, which could possibly take the user to a page that shows their questions that have no answer more than one week ago.
Questions that are older than one or two months that do not have a solution with an answer with more than 3 upvotes will automatically be selected as the solution, OR they are simply marked as closed.
#1. “You have several questions that have not been solved!” Yes, and there’s still no solution. Now what? #2. “older than one or two months” What’s the point if there’s no solution?
Unreal team on UE answerhub used to do that. Basically they mark answers solved for you and used to hunt down every question they believe is “solved”. The only thing that achieves is annoying people.
Stuns like that only create reason to avoid answerhubs.
It is not like Unity office would selfdestruct if there’s too many opened answers. Relevant info will still show up on google, no point in closing anything.
It annoys me as well. I don’t know if there’s any easy solution though. Unity Answers seems to attract people who are unable to read the FAQ (just like the forums attracts people who can’t find the Learn part of the site). I think we’re stuck having @Kiwasi and other moderators just marking the correct answers.
@Ryiah : The primary purpose of answerhubs is providing data for search engines to index. It doesn’t matter where solution is located - in comment or in answer, and it certainly is completely irrelevant if this answer is marked as accepted. Sure, it may annoy someone’s inner perfectionist, but that’s about it. It is more important to either actually have solution somehwere on the page OR at least have some trail of breadcrumbs one canbe followed to reach that solution.
What is the purpose of that data though? To provide a knowledge base of questions with answers. Reaching the correct question is important but being able to find the correct answer is equally important.
How do they know the correct answer though if it isn’t marked? Or even in the correct location for an answer? Reading comments can sometimes shed additional light on the matter but it isn’t the place you put the bulk of the answer.
If someone is forced to read through every answer and every comment they may as well have used the forums.
Once again though if they’re forced to read every answer and comment they may as well use the forums. It doesn’t hurt anything either that we’re often very quick to respond here even to answers that have been handled so many times we’re sick of them.
The primary use of the forums and answerhubs is to provide search data for the engines, which will be referenced by people in the future.
The secondary use is to respond to user queries and entertain people who hang out in general section during christmas for some incomprehensible reason.
“Which answer is correct” and “is the answer correct” does not represent useful info. Verifying answer for most queries takes seconds (Imagine this: “To do that X, mark checkbox here. – BUT HOW DO I KNOW IT IS THE TRUTH???”), or the the subject is complex enough and would require some thinking either way.
Beyond “where is that checkbox” level, it is often important to know WHY the answer was “correct” (or “worked”) in that particular scenario. That information is usually hidden in comments in form of breadcrumbs, keywords and links that can lead you somewhere. While original poster might not give a damn about it, it is important for people who will arrive later. Person who originally asked question does not give care if the question was accepted. People who come later can figure it out by themselves.
So, “accepted”, “not accepted” does not matter as long as the information is on the page.
P.S. That reminds me of the short story called “The Sack” written by William Morrison.
What does this have to do with the topic of the thread though? The discussion is about suggesting ways to encourage users to more correctly use the AnswerHub. How the search engines find the page has nothing to do with this because once the question is found the user needs to be able to determine the correct answer.
Simply telling people to “use their brain” isn’t sufficient. Someone new won’t necessarily be able to spot the correct answer.
Thanks for making me laugh.
There’s no correct(what you call correct is your subjective opinion) way to use answerhub. If you’re trying to do same thing as SO(may it rest in pieces) did, you don’t have enough people for that. Keep in mind that SO, despite originally having good intentions, managed to turn their site into shit using those intentions, so following their example is not a good idea.
They have a brain for that. If they don’t have a brain, they’re not suitable for gamedev.
Most info on the web is already aimed at the newbies, which is actually a problem (because getting any kind of assintance with medium difficulty, advanced or hard question is difficult if not impossible). So at this point there’s no real reason in babysitting newbies even further. If they can’t find answers with all the available information, they simply don’t have what it takes.
Human nature will remain the same, and in online communication you’ll have higher degree of hostility and insanity in the people (due to loss of non-verbal communication and reduced empathy).
So you’ll want to design the rules in such way that they’ll prevent reign of jerks and lunatics on your resource.
SO rules were designed in such way, that they rewarded quantity of answers instead of quality of the answer, difficulty of the original question or rarity of knowledge. Basically, on SO noob question that can be googled could result in 20+ upvotes, while complex question that requires 5 years of expertise would give you one or no upvote, because a lot of people won’t even understand it. Because of that people with lots of time on their hands could farm reputation by answering large number of trivial newbie questions. Higher reputation gave more power. So, in three years because of combination of those factors, rabid lunatics ended up in charge of the resource and the resource went to shit after that.
As they say, road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In general, any karma based system is a timebomb. having a counter that is called “reputation” triggers inner hamster in some people, so they will try to increase that “reputation” counter just so they feel important, and then they’ll look down on anyone who has smaller counter. Something similar occasionally happens with post count, when 10+k post member looks down at someone with 1…5 posts, even though 1…5 guy actually has a point.
Read the User Guide and the Moderator Guidelines. While the documentation is not very good at clearly explaining how you’re supposed to use the AnswerHub there are definitely rules on how things are supposed to be organized.
Just as one example you mentioned earlier it doesn’t matter where the solution is located yet the guidelines specify that an answer placed within a comment is to be converted into an answer and vice versa.
The problem pointed out by the OP is largely due to how the rules are enforced. Currently it’s coming onto the shoulders of the moderators. They’re having to deal with converting the questions, answers, comments, etc to follow the guidelines rather than have users do it correctly.
Question is whether or not trying to better enforce those rules would actually bring any benefits. Or if like you suggested it would simply lead to another Stack Overflow.
We’re heading towards another semantic/definition argument here.
The links you posted reflect opinion of the people who put up answerhub, and outline behaviour they thought would be the most beneficial for the resources. Meaning while there’s good intention, and the rules are supposed to be enforced it doesn’t mean that would result in the best outcome. Given that main job of average human developer is to mess up with hilarious consequences, any rule if rigorously enforced will probably backfire.
To get another stackoverflow you’d need 100 times more people. You might get one or two uber jackasses though.
In my experience adamantly trying to enforce rules doesn’t bring much benefit to the resource where rules are are being enforced.
It is more valuable to maintain friendly atmosphere. Tech professionals have the problem when they sometimes get so caught in rules or practices or whatever, so they forget how to normally talk to another human. So In my opinion, it would be better for people to attempt to be friendly, professional and helpful, instead of constantly looking for the “proper” or “correct” way to use answerhub. What OP suggest is basically direction towards slippery slope that may result in resource where people generally are not welcome and is useless to everybody, BUT there’s bunch of people that are real proud of the “enforcing the right way of doing things”.
As a noob, I’d like to illustrate some of the immediate problems I am facing with unity 5.
The biggest of all is finding deprecated code examples on unity answer, for someone who knows what they are doing they can probably find their way around to mod the code, to make it work, no such luck for absolute noobs like me, who rely on copy and pasting.
Mixture of three different languages now, deprecate the other two, make one the go to, better still deprecate c# use golang
Not related to unity answers, but just provide more real world examples in the documentation. I think that would help. Youtube videos in the tutorial section should be code written for 5.0, not sure if all have the code snippet equivalents.
These documents reflect the viewpoint of Unity Technologies on how their Answer Hub is to be managed. You may not have noticed but the Moderator Guidelines did not state that they are suggested guidelines. Rather they are guidelines that we’re agreeing to follow when they make us a moderator.
Where have I stated that they had to be strictly enforced? When you play a board game for the first time what do you normally do? You read the rules correct? Sometimes there are concessions made for moments where the rule doesn’t seem to truly fit the matter at hand yet you still follow the bulk of the rules.
The same thing is very much true about the rules for the Answer Hub. Questions are usually fairly obvious but an answer or comment may occasionally be too difficult to tell which it truly belongs to. This is where you might make a concession and I’m confident the moderators are already doing this when necessary.
Ultimately the problem the OP is bringing up is not that big of a deal. We see something similar on these forums all the time where a user will post a thread in a section entirely not intended for that thread. Yet I have never seen you create a post or thread suggesting a moderator leave them alone when they show up to move or close the thread.
Err, would you kindly turn off nitpicking mode?
Reread my previous statement and try to get general idea behind it instead of trying to find some hidden meaning behind this or that word. There are no loaded arguments there, just unfiltered expression of what I think. No point in singling out specific words and getting angry/annoyed at them either.
