Sorry if this seems whiney, but are we pretty much giving up on stopping General Discussion from becoming packed with help threads?
It says, very first thing, right in the description to General Discussion “This is NOT a support forum, for technical help post in the correct forum.”
Yet right now there are about five threads on the first page that are people asking for technical help.
Can we please move these threads and stop encouraging new users to look for help in here by giving it to them?
I agree with you that they should be moved, but if they aren’t, we shouldn’t ignore them. People starting out seeking help shouldn’t necessarily be not helped for posting in the wrong place.
From my own experience if you post questions in the correct section you will likely get no answers unless you are lucky, so I can see why people would post here.
Yeah, maybe I’m being a little grumpy at new people.
Because constantly posting “I know the answer, but I won’t tell you unless you post it in the the right forum” makes people think you are a jerk.
Should the moderators not be moving posts to correct sections, just a thought
What? There are different sections to ask specific questions to specific areas that I’m stuck in? I figured you just dump everything and anything regardless of what it is in the general discussion.
Silly me. 
You can use the “report post” button for off-topic threads.
–Eric
Take a look at the other forums. Many dead threads with no replies. That’s probably why. I always try to post in the right forum, but I often feel like no one reads the other forums.
The specialised subforums are supposed to be a place where people with specialised knowledge, can help people with specialised questions.
In practise, the people with that knowledge don’t seem to realise they have it, or they don’t want to actively help people. Thus those people do not subscribe to the specialised forums, or browse them regularly.
As a result, questions posted in those forums get very low traffic, and very few answers. But it is clear that despite the specialised nature of those questions, the knowledge on how to answer them is pretty commonplace, as evidenced by the fact that you very often get those answers when you post in a more generalised forum.
There’s a fundamental failure of design here.
I have a feeling that many people browse the general, scripting, and game design forums because they enjoy the discussions, they have a reason to keep coming back. And requests for help that pop up in those places are a kind of “I’m here anyways, might as well help” vibe.
There isn’t enough discussion in the specialised forums to warrant people browsing them for fun, so there’s less people there as a result.
What’s the solution?
Remove the incentive to not-post in them, by making the act of posting in them actually yield results. This may require unity staffmembers subscribing to a subforum each and making a conscious attempt to answer everything in it. It’s notable that @Mecanim-Dev does this a lot in the animation subforum, and as a result i’d argue, there’s relatively little posting about animation questions outside of that.
Encourage knowledgeable people to visit those forums, for any reason at all. This might be helped by creating interesting discussions there and engaging with the community. Perhaps also hints in the UI reminding people to subscribe to a forum that interests them, and making it more easy and obvious to do so.
Encourage altruistic effort to help people. The unity answers system is pretty neat, in that it gives you more privileges as you collect likes and do stuff. But those rewards aren’t really relevant to people who don’t actively visit the Answers system. Maybe weekly/monthly prize draws, store credit vouchers or something, would be nice.
MAKE A GODDAMN WIKI.
Seriously though, why isn’t there a good unity wiki? Yes i know that there is one. It’s shit, it’s the worst wiki i’ve ever seen, because it’s a walled garden with entrance requirements a mile high in order to sign up, and no unregistered editing allowed. You have to practically fill in a survey about your life history to make an account, it demanded information for verification that i wasn’t willing to give.
The lack of a good wiki to collect community knowledge is seriously harmful, repositories of knowledge like that can greatly reduce problems and enhance collective consciousness.
On a similar note:
5. Improve the unity documentation. it sucks.
I’ve lost count of how many times i’ve made a thread on these forums, just to ask for a complete explanation of a feature because the official documentation’s explanation was either lacking or nonexistent. And many times, after learning what i needed, i’ve longed to go back and edit that documentation so others wouldn’t need to ask the same questions in future. but of course it’s a walled off thing only editable by unity staff. At least having a good wiki would go a long way towards solving this.
In short, the whole unity community and system has some major problems. you should really just hire me as your community manager, i could do a far better job than who or whatever is doing it now. Until these core flaws are fixed, you’re going to see endless cross posting, repetition of previous discussion, and a lack of knowledge growth amongst users.
Wow. Just wow.
Lots of people poke fun at the Unity community. I’ve been at this a long time and have worked with some of the best in the industry, and we have on a number of occasions talked about unity users in a less then favorable way. But it’s always in the context of we know many are not professionals who do this for a living. We don’t think they are stupid, we know they just lack experience.
People aren’t born knowing how to efficiently find information. That’s a learned skill. Unity targets people with little to no experience. You really really should know this and understand it’s implications. On top of that Nanako makes some really good points. It’s not easy to know the right place to post on your forums until you have spent some time here.
If one of my employees said something like this to my customers on any forum, the first words out of my mouth would be ‘what the **** were you thinking?’, followed by having them make a public apology.
Unity has a different business model. They are not trying to attract any one new developer. They are trying to attract every new developer. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.
Most users that consistently post in the wrong forum and lack googling skills don’t Last long enough to spend money on unity. So offending a few is no big deal.
Good programmers often tend to be direct. Compilers tell things exactly as they are and this attitude often spills over.
Graham’s point is valid.
Unity was created with the goal of democratizing game development. People with little to no experience are definitely among those Unity is targeting, but they are not the sole focus.
But this is a site for the community to use. Unity employees do chip in and help. But it’s a site for the community to help each other.
Why can’t community members set up a wiki?
I’ve been trying to set up a way for the community to be able to add content to the docs. For around 5 years. It’s never been accepted by other Unity peeps.
Drop down to Brighton at some point and catch up with us. You’re saying that you are better than me, Aurore and Sara, right? 
It isn’t just new people. I’ve made several posts about networking in the correct section and got about 2 replies on 1 of the several topics. UNet is new and exciting… and the most important part of a multiplayer game, synchronization, is not present in the demos and unclear how to achieve with the docs. I have been experimenting with it for a little over 2 weeks now and all of my results have desync problems (minor, but in grid based games SUPER noticeable) and or very not smooth movement on any of the clients, sometimes even the server.
Network transform - add this component to your games to get a jittery mess of what-might-be-several-patches-from-now synchronization!
People come to this forum to be noticed and heard
That’s true, but still…
… there are reasonable efforts in place to make it pretty clear that this is the wrong place, and those are getting missed or ignored.
I wonder if a more guided experience wouldn’t be helpful here. For instance, in addition to the “New thread” button there could be an “Ask a question” or “Get help” button which asks a few multiple choice questions and then automatically picks the correct forum, etc. for that post. It could even put it on Unity Answers instead of (or as well as) in the forum.
It could go one step further and explicitly ask them to search both the Unity Community and Google and confirm that they’ve done so before clicking the “Post my question” button.
It could go another step further and provide a template that gets people to ask questions the smart way. The awesome thing is that this would end up somewhat similar to “Rubber Ducking”, and might help people solve some of their questions before they even get posted.
I generally sort of ignore the really stupid people. It’s a kind of triage.
We are starting to get these things in place on Unity Answers, for example in the FAQ which also links to a thread on how to ask a good question
People don’t seem to read the FAQ and can get upset when their questions get rejected by the mods, even though we have clear moderator guidelines
In the very near future we will have sticky posts referring to these different sites, and an updated user guide.
We currently have two Community Managers, myself and @SaraCecilia , I’m also back from holiday so, welcome back to me.
I spend a lot of time moving posts from the discussion forum into the correct support forum, unfortunately experienced and not beginners (I’m talking in forum user terms) users are more likely to do this, to filter it down more it’s users who don’t post in any other forum.
This is predominately a support forum, the discussion forum is disposable. I’ve thought of handing out warning points to the experienced users who misuse it, or even limiting everyones ability to post here. But that would be a pretty shitty way to run things.
@Nanako Yes our community system has a lot of problems, even more than the ones you’ve pointed out. There is one problem to rule them all which is getting development time. I’d be happy to talk more with you in private about all of the things.
There is a lot Sara and I do behind the scenes that we just don’t talk about, one of them being a huge project to overhaul the whole site. We also have the Answers upgrade which for some inexplicable reason explodes the site every time we implement it, we now know why this happens so hopefully that will be a reality soon.
SO back on the original topic, general discussion isn’t the only place where there are threads in the wrong section but it’s only because we visit all the sections that we actually notice and move them. The amount of reports to move threads is very low, we need users to report them if they see them.
Totally agree on this, there is a report button which I use when I see spam and issues.
Most time gets taken care of, but not sure by who or Moderator Eric?
PS.Please update Current Unity Version: 5.1.1 to 5.1.2