What should we improve about our forums?

Unity Engine
1

Hey,

We have long term plans to improve the way we facilitate our users to learn, and to help eachother.

Those are not done yet. In the shorter term, we want to see what changes we could make to our existing forum infrastructure that would allow our users to “get more” out of our forums.

Who knows this better than you?

We’d greatly appreciated if you could write a short post in this thread, saying what parts of the forum do and do not work for you, and roughly how long you’ve been using Unity.

We’re looking for both technical issues (search has this annoying delay), as social ones. (signal/noise ratio is too low)

We can’t promise we will fix your specific requests, but knowing what you find most annoying / would benefit most of, will at least allow us to make better decisions.

Thanks for your help,

Lucas Meijer
Unity Developer

2

Hello Lucas :slight_smile:

I do have a thing that would be awesome to fix :smile:

And its that when I enter the forum, since my last visit, sometimes shows that all
the posts have been read :S

that makes me difficult to keep my self up to date on which are the newest posts :slight_smile:

and another thing. for some reason, my session is not stored everytime, so like each 2-3 days I have to log again :S, sometimes 2 times in the same day

3

On one forum system (can’t remember where) I saw a feature that would let you save favorite posts (useful code snippets, tutorials, etc) in your account. That would be a cool feature.

I also have the issue mentioned by naruse… Sometimes I log in and everything is marked as read, even when I haven’t had a chance to read it. It’s annoying, but it’s also intermittent.

4

Social Bookmarking
To expand on the idea of personal bookmarking above, it would be interesting to have a del.icio.us style of bookmarking; social bookmarking. A way to identify which posts are the most beneficial/favorite throughout the community. I don’t see this being used as a vanity thing, but rather a ‘solutions promoter’. Not every solution is going to get posted on UnifyCommunity.

You could see which topics are the most popular. Outside of Showcase, this popular topics are going to be problems and solutions. GUIManager, UISprite, SmartFox, Pathfinding, etc.

FAQ
Ideally, it needs to evolve into a better run FAQ. I know the search option is there, but we all know it’s not used as often as it should be. Most posts are one-line questions, concerning one feature/function. I don’t have an easy solution for this aside from “build an FAQ manually.” However, once built and stickied, it really should cut down on the number of repeat posts.

Unsolved/Solved Status
This feature is on some Q&A sites/forums, and it could work here in the same way that you can flag a post with a Poll. Basically the post would be tagged as “Open” or “Solved.”

Solved posts would let someone know that the original post question had a solution as a response, which is nice. Sometimes I start reading a topic only to realize no one ended up solving the issue.

Open posts would let someone know that the problem is unsolved. You could even browse by “Open/Unsolved” in an attempt to answer questions/problems, and not get distracted by gossip/showcase-type posts.

There are a lot of things which could be done, but I think the most effective ones will be those which target the one-line question/problem posts, and assist those people getting those problems answered (by Unity staff, or by the community). An easier way to identify/sort those will result in more answers, and more solutions available for all.

5

Unsolved/Solved Status Totally Agree with Tempest!!!

6

Maybe hire more people whose sole duty is to answer questions on the forum.

(Since the release of 2.5 and the boom of new users I see a lot of unanswered posts or questions)

Otherwise I see it turning into like the other engines forums, where people will get agitated because they arent getting any timely help or advice.

7

I’d like some type of scoring/ranking mechanism that would allow users to give out and earn points based on the questions they ask and/or answer.

This idea could be extended to allow users to earn points based on informational posts (maybe on the wiki). I.E. write a great article on how to improve frame rates on the iPhone and users will reward you with points.

There could also be sometype of widget that users could place on their websites that show-off their ranking. Achieving a certain high ranking would be almost equivalent to earning a Unity Certification (or something)… a “Unity VIP”

8

Add mine as a second vote for:

  • Points / credit to those who help
  • Mark threads as resolved / open

It’s probably not possible, but it would be nice if I could set a default filter on the “messages since last visit” that ignored posts to sections I don’t want to watch (which in my case is anything to do with iPhone). Sometimes when I’ve been away for a while and I hit the “messages since last visit” and it spans several pages. Would be nice to be able to filter out some of that.

9

I’d like to see the option to disable avatars and signatures. Most other forums have this, which I appreciate, since I find that some people abuse these by having annoying animated avatars and/or large images in signatures, which just makes the forums more of a chore to look at. Also better anti-spammer measures.

The system of whether posts are read or not does indeed seem to be flawed, except I have the opposite problem where posts I’ve read usually show up again as unread next time I visit. I work around this by always using the “mark all forums read” link every time.

–Eric

10

This is the 3D GameStudio forum, maybe there are ideas here ?

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/

I like the idea of a neebies section where people can ask (seemingly) trivial questions without feeling too stoopid :slight_smile:

Thanks

11

I love this forum and it has been essential in learning Unity.

  1. SEARCH: make results link to the actual post (at the very minimum, the page). Results shows one result per hit, with snippets perhaps. Perhaps you can try using Google’s site search? It might make relevant topics rise higher rather than sorting by a fixed thing like date (Google Cloud Search: Smart Business Database | Google Workspace). I think you can try it for free.

  2. I’d like to see you force something along the lines of “This request is for: Standalone/iphone/web” on new posts, and make it very clear and obvious in threads and in searches. Right now it’s not always obvious (iPhone shaders: go in the iphone section or shaders?) and even when it’s posted to iphone, it’s just a little thing up in the corner, easy to miss.

  3. I like the notion of “resolved”, and a noob section. I tend to see a lot of repeat questions, over and over, that are so hard to answer. Things like “how do I make a gun”.

  4. This isn’t forum related exactly, but I’d love to see user notes in the online manual. I don’t like how php.net does it, and I don’t want users to be able to completely re-write official docs, but perhaps a hybrid where a wiki page appears below the official docs or something, or stack-overflow like where the best posts rise.

12

Some of my opinions:

  • I agree with the delay. For registered members, it should be removed or just two seconds to cut down on bots or what not :).

  • And personally, a limit on avatar dimensions. This forum will eventually become crowded with huge animated avatar gifs or signature images which will reduce the readbility of the forums a lot. (Look at any game website which does not enforce such rules). (What Eric5h5 says applies as well).

  • Point/credits systems will lead to abuse. Just look at Gamedev.net for an easy example. Right now the Unity forums are still relatively small. My experience (I moderate and have moderated quite some game sites) is that eventually you will have less friendly and understanding people around. Points will be abused then.

I’m glad that you guys are looking for forum improvements! But I am a pretty happy using this forum already ;).

13

I agree with the above points

  • Noob section, we’re all noobs at one stage or another, and walking into the noob section is a lot easier for people joining the forums than posting a “How do I load Unity” question right next to a “How do I interact with an SQL database from inside the webplayer app”.
  • Points system could be good, I do see some useless/flame comments around, and while they are few and far between, it would be nice to be able to weed them out, or let those people know those comments aren’t welcome.
  • Resolved status on threads. Too many are sitting around unresolved that are sometimes 3 pages long. Thats a lot of reading for no result…kind of like cricket ;).

I’d also like to see these.

  • Highlighting of Unity developer responses. I know it comes up next to their names but this is quite easy to skim over, and 9 times out of 10 they are going to provide the best possible response.
  • Vote for best answer. This can quite often make finding the answer to the problem a lot easier. I know this won’t exactly translate to every thread as some end up being lengthy conversations, but if it’s a question, a highlighted best answer would make searching the forums a bit quicker. Would probably say use this over the Unity developer response highlighting.

The main reason I say highlighting of these is that there is a lot of great information on the forums, but it can sometimes be a slight chore to sift through. Any way that we can speed up finding of information is good in my books.

14

Hierarchical answers are what I think is one of the things most needed.
On longer threads its completely impossible to usefull find out which answer went where and realistically we can’t assume that all just post on the initial posting, so a board technology with support for hierarchy in the answers would be a great step forward at least to me

15

One point for me would be to use a Google indexer hardware box actually on the forums. Finding the answers is the most difficult part and for now, Google offers one of the best searches around. That would be for me step 1 to solve the issues. Note: Google offers hardware pizza box servers to put into your own infrastructure and they run Google specialised to your site. GarageGames did this years ago and it was a very good step in the right direction beeing able to use the standard search (like Google is for most of us) combined with the Unity forum.

(oh, and improve the speed another time of the forum, starts getting slow again)

Further: Some intelligent system to rate answers and questions based on experience, own written answers and such.

Tighter integration of the Unify Wiki, maybe with own BB syntax tags.

Maybe integration of BB Youtube tags for the forum.

Hmm, need to think more about these issues.

16

Hiya,

  1. Make the whole forum faster, its usually quite slow at browsing and searching. Lately it shows the forum posts as a list then it loads in icons for each post. This makes clicking a thread difficult as its loading in.

  2. Have an option to view latest posts only, this is nice if it lists forum wide not just the sub forum you are in and shows top 50 or so latest posts. Also maybe to show top 20 unanswered posts.

Thats it, I think in general these forums and the IRC channel are a great resource.

Geoff

17

the first half of 2 is already present actually. I only visit the board through that way, “view post since last visit”.

18

I would like a search function that searches the entire website including the documentation and forum. The old posts are very valuable to understanding the engine as is the documentation.

When making a switch DO NOT lose the old posts. They are a real reference source. Most of us search them with google site:unity3d.com commands.

19

It’s been mentioned before but a much better Search would be very handy. I’ve given up using the forum search and always go to google and type

‘[question] unity3d’

20

my start page is at google with site:unity3d.com already entered. :smile: