Update about the future of Unity Answers

[Brach_Unity]

Hi everyone,

After receiving your feedback last year, when we announced our initial plans to shut down Unity Answers , we returned to the drawing board. We have spent the time since then working on a better solution that we’d like to share with you. In summary, we will migrate Unity Answers content to a new Community platform and are aiming to launch a public beta later in May. Before the beta starts, we will set Unity Answers to read-only mode in order to prepare for the migration so that the existing content is available on the new platform from the first day of public testing. We will set up redirects for all migrated questions and answers to ensure old links won’t break when Unity Answers has been taken offline. Unity Answers will reach the end of its life at the end of May.

The new platform will be called Unity Discussions and is powered by Discourse. We have chosen to work with Discourse because it supports threaded comments, highlighting of accepted answers, and other key capabilities that match our vision. It is also a very flexible and customizable technology, so we can continue to ensure we meet the needs of our evolving community.

Please read on for more information.

Reasons for the migration and long-term vision
Last year we stated:

@LeonhardP

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.

What was true last year is still true today. Our community sites have sprawled, and we genuinely want to offer you a way to easily find answers and enjoy sharing your insights with the Unity Community.

The Forums and Answers systems that have been around for many years are not scaling well, and we have spent this year re-imagining and working on a better solution. Part of what you have helped us see is the redundancy between these sites, but also how they are serving you differently. We aim to consolidate our platform technologies while expanding what you can do within the official Unity Community ecosystem.

We will do this in stride with your continuous feedback. We are starting a closed beta of the new platform today with a number of members from the Unity community. Once we have completed the data migration, we will launch Unity Discussions in public beta for Q&A discussions as we sunset Answers by the end of May.

The Unity Forums will remain as they are for the time being, with the intent to also migrate them to Unity Discussions, starting later this year once the site has matured.

Next steps
For the upcoming open beta, we are focusing on providing a replacement solution for Unity Answers that meets the following needs:

• Preserve existing knowledge and keep old links accessible via redirects

• Preserve existing user accounts and their connection to questions and answers

• Provide community members with the ability to ask questions, discuss answers, and mark accepted answers as solutions

• Provide an updated tagging structure to make it easier to categorize and navigate conversations

• Update guidelines and provide onboarding information and templates for the new platform

The following things will be happening, so that Unity Answers is sunset by the end of May.

• Unity Answers becomes read-only

• Unity Answers Data is migrated to Unity Discussions

• Unity Discussions launches in open beta

• Redirects for old Answers links are set up after verifying the success of the migration

• Unity Answers is taken offline

• Unity Discussions leaves beta and fully launches

Call for feedback and future updates
Please let us know your thoughts about these changes in the comments below. We will share more detailed information about the new platform and updates on the migration in a couple of weeks once we are ready to begin the open beta.

[Shizola]

Discourse looks good so I’m cautiously optimistic about that. Unless I dreamed it, I think the forums were once moved to a different platform and everyone hated it, so I’d be careful with moving those.

[jiraphatK]

I tried surfing forums powered by Discourse(Atlassian and Figma). As far as a replacement for Unity Answer, yes please. But to replace Unity forum, there need to be a search function inside the thread. Some Asset Store threads or long thread that spanned multiple years have humongous number of comments and just scrolling through everything to find one specific answer won’t do it. Can it be added?

[osmangormus]

@jiraphatK

I tried surfing forums powered by Discourse(Atlassian and Figma). As far as a replacement for Unity Answer, yes please. But to replace Unity forum, there need to be a search function inside the thread. Some Asset Store threads or long thread that spanned multiple years have humongous number of comments and just scrolling through everything to find one specific answer won’t do it. Can it be added?

I believe what you’re asking is already available in Discourse by default.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwbsejn0UVI

[jiraphatK]

@osmangormus

I believe what you’re asking is already available in Discourse by default.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwbsejn0UVI

I think you misunderstood me.
For example this thread.
Unity Future .NET Development Status page-35
If it’s on the new forum and I want to search all the comments that have keyword ‘.NET8’, how would I do that? In Unity forum, I can type the search words in the top right input box and it shows all relevant answer.

In context of Unity Answer replacement, it’s not really important.
But I use this function a lot with the current Unity forum.

[MiTschMR]

Thank you very much for listening to us and investing the time and resources to build the new discussions platform! What I sincerely hope is that there will be more community interaction with developers themselves. Currently, it seems like it is either hit or miss with who is responsible for communication on a product (Unity Hub, several Unity Gaming Services features etc.) where there is radio silence for months, no “support”, you being left alone with your problems.

[osmangormus]

Thank you @jiraphatK for the clarification, and for the real life example. I will look into this.

[khan-amil]

So after all this time and feedbacks last time that your planning times were way too short you come up one year later with a better plan but still a ridiculously short timeframe for the move.

The beta starts “soon”, answers will be set as read only, transferred to the new site, be ready for users to join in, be ready for users to contribute, and give feedback, all in less than one month before the plug is pulled on unity answers.

The motivations behind the moves and the target seem good, but it feel a lot like you’re more pushed by the next billing cycle as by the quality of the product and the end result.

[AcidArrow]

@Brach_Unity

The Unity Forums will remain as they are for the time being, with the intent to also migrate them to Unity Discussions, starting later this year once the site has matured.

I think I still have some popcorn from the time you moved the forums to Lithium.

But I guess the people behind this move weren’t at Unity at the time, which I guess also explains why history is repeating.

[karl_jones]

@AcidArrow

I think I still have some popcorn from the time you moved the forums to Lithium.

But I guess the people behind this move weren’t at Unity at the time, which I guess also explains why history is repeating.

Some of us were
I tested both and this one is far superior to Lithium

[Etonix]

Publishers seeking alternative solutions for support and ticketing systems, feel free to reach out. I’ve got things in place.

[makaka-org]

Dark Mode, please.

[karl_jones]

@makaka-org

Dark Mode, please.

[PanthenEye]

Sounds good to me. Looking forward to it.

[Kamyker]

@Brach_Unity

We have chosen to work with Discourse because it supports threaded comments, highlighting of accepted answers, and other key capabilities that match our vision.

And most importantly Upvotes that are missing since Unity Feedback was removed.

[ModLunar]

Haha!

This sounds like a wonderful, well-thought-out (and quite large) change.
I’m excited to see what this looks like once the open beta launches, and thanks for taking a ton of feedback into consideration!

[makaka-org]

What about the Answers Tab in Unity Hub? It is still here.

[PBKitty]

Discourse doesn’t work on either my primary desktop browser OR my primary phone browser without a lot of annoyance on my end- not due to any incompatibility of features, but because they disable the forum on anything they don’t whitelist. And ignore your browser’s useragent.

[Brach_Unity]

@karl_jones

Dark mode is there

[Brach_Unity]

@khan-amil

So after all this time and feedbacks last time that your planning times were way too short you come up one year later with a better plan but still a ridiculously short timeframe for the move.

The beta starts “soon”, answers will be set as read only, transferred to the new site, be ready for users to join in, be ready for users to contribute, and give feedback, all in less than one month before the plug is pulled on unity answers.

The motivations behind the moves and the target seem good, but it feel a lot like you’re more pushed by the next billing cycle as by the quality of the product and the end result.

Thanks for the feedback, the aim is to build something better for the whole community.We want to find ways to encourage us to engage with user and vice versa, something that we have heard called out by our community. We will be iterating on the site as much as needed and we will keep making improvements, The plan is to have a public roadmap where you can all see what we are planning for the community and see what we are doing.