A new Unity Pro or Paid forum needed?

I like the idea of censored forums where just elite folks have a voice. First thing i would censor is such stupid threads like this one here

 

I didn't read this whole yarn but there are pro's and con's... seems a little elitist in some respects, `pro` folks not wanting to be surrounded with ameteurs, kinda thing, or at least that's how it comes across. It's good to have a mix of advanced users and beginners, helps us all to help each other keep a fresher perspective and serve each other. I can see though that some people would benefit from a `meeting of minds`... but I'm not sure how that will be beneficial?

 

Guys, the thread has turned to a suggestion thread, fyi

 

Asset exchange would be a big no no for me, asset store brings one key thing to the table : single licencing terms (except for the odd item here there with it's own licence). I know i wouldn't consider buying anything anywhere else than the asset store as the more assets i get, the more important it gets to have a single licence and have them all in the same easy to manage place.

 

I like the idea too, and im not even an elite user. Paying users SHOULD have a designated area where they get full staff confrontation. there should be several staff there ready to support each user individually on a 1 on 1 basis. even if this was a yearly service, It just would be nice because you'd actually get some real help. Of course then there is issues like staff commitment and people just milking it to get everything done for them. But just something to help. just my opinion, but I definitely think this current scheme of everyone being novice and equal (if your not, im not talking about you) being demanding over users who quite frankly, deserve more is wrong. Top row is golden for people to shine, the ones moaning about not being on it aren't good enough, simple as that. I certainly know im not good enough but I fully support it.

Tom/Antenna, would be nice to see if you go through with it.

 

Problem is: the forum is not suited to business because noise and quantity kill quality.

 

Hm, i should`ve really put the irony tags aside. I thought it was clear that my sentence was meant as saracasm.

 

Yeah you pretty much described totalitarian oligarchy.

 

Non experienced users would be able to access it, they can even reply to post, but they cant create a thread! They would gain all the knowledge, and I think it would be easier to find. I say again, none of this would be needed if the forum was for discussions only, any kind of how to do something or I have a problem should be posted in Answers. Seeing as asking in Answers goes unanswerd it drives the questions on to here. Even I ask questions on here as I am more likely to get help.

 

How about a compromise. A forum where you can only post if you know what this will print:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. var i = 0;
3. print(++i == 0 ? "Hello World" : "Goodbye, world!");
4.  

Would knock out 90% of the noise right there.

 

"Goodbye, world !"
Thats some bizarre syntax though , you add to i , then evaluate i as a bool .
Anyway, this might be confusing to a C# programer , (since I don't think you can use ? in the same way in C#) , which is most of the pros here, ironic .

Back to the OP , you have the option of paying for paid support . You need that , then fine . But this is a community forum , its for everyone . No need to split it up( a post count requirement would help though , since
Questions about actual programming < Vague questions like 'How do i make a game like super high budget game X '

 

Although a large chunk of unity users may not in fact, know any programming Visual tools allow people to create games with bare/no knowledge.

 

Not every professional Unity user is a coder...

 

And no one can answer this too considering the language wasn't specified, which language is it? What does print do?

 

No, but I would be surprised if there are many Unity professionals that haven't purchased either the main Pro Unity or one of the Pro target platform licences. You need that just to get rid of the Unity splash screen, incidentally the only reason I bought it. I don't think the new site should be limited to coders at all, I'm after professionals in every category.

 

Eh... It was valid C# and UnityScript... print() is a MonoBehaviour method. Within the context of the conversation, both of these are fairly easy to figure out (and if you can't, well... the test worked )

 

@Tiles and imaginaryhuman -

I can understand completely how some of the opinions here can seem elitist when you're sat on the other side of the fence but believe me when I say that elitism has nothing to do with it. If anything it could be viewed more as us wanting equality. We simply want access to some level of forum support as is already enjoyed by the many ameteurs / beginners here who dont seem to have much problem getting answers to their questions. Unfortunately due to the way things are, only a minority of users here or the small numbers of Unity engineers are able to answer the more advanced questions which at the moment quickly get buried and go unanswered which is why we ask for more visiblity for these things. Its simply a case of necessity so we too can enjoy some support, especially since this is the only place we can really come to for Unity specific questions.

I've really got nothing against beginners, we've all been there at one point, and I'd say I've done my fair share of spreading the knowledge. I've spent many hours answering questions on various forums, I've written plenty of tutorials over the years at various places, and I even used to host, judge, and raise prizes for development competitions I used to run at a website. I've also been trying repeatedly on various threads to suggest solutions that would help advance users whilst having as little impact on the beginner community as possible.

Unfortunately since so far it feels that Unity forum staff and the wider community has been dismissing our concerns, this inevitably results in some hostility and pushes some people to even try to form their own support groups in desperation. Its not personal though, we just want our issues taken seriously.

 

I know that . . . i was just pointing that posting some very trivial level question to filter professionals made no sense. And that not only the question is simple but it 1) doesn't represent anything a professional coder would do (magic numbers etc) and 2) Uses basic level constructs that most of the people you'd want to filter DO know! And i pointed it by stating that the correct response is, i don't know, it's very easy to get in a context where print does something else, or would print something else than expected.

 

This, when I look to collaborate I ask that the programmer owns unity pro, just to abolish the splash :L

 

Probably depends on your country too, in some countries where 1.5K$ is quite a bit, i'm sure startups are willing to put up with a splash

 

You can create your own Private Paid Unity Custom Forum and ask every paid pro user to join. ^^

 

It's also important to interpret polls correctly, 30VS70 is the ratio among people who cared to answer, so even at 30% it's heavily biased toward yes, it's probably closer to 10% then

 

By your very own logic is could be that 90% want a new forum but as with most things in life the silent ones go, well silent. I don't know what the percentage of paid vs free users of Unity is but I suspect it's millions free and a few thousand paid, so I would be mighty surprised to see my poll result swing into the positive for a new forum.

All I'll add is one day a lot of you free users will be paid pro users, if not pro, your will consider yourselves pro, then one weekend you need an answer to something that is holding up your game release, you will come here to the only place there is for an answer then regret the day you thought the forum was ok as it is.

 

Just to be clear, i'm a pro user, and i've spent 10K$ on the store on top of the pro licence, and i do wish there was better support, i still don't like the idea of an external forum.

 

I understand the frustrations with signal-to-noise ratio, but honestly... that's what the Internet is like. There's a plethora of problems inherent in taking a splinter-group and forming your own segregationist community.

For starters, if I have a choice between posting a question here or on the segregated forum, where do you think I'm going to do it? Here, where Unity developers are active and anyone's allowed to join in the discussion (just because someone hasn't purchased a Pro license doesn't mean they can't help me - what if it's a general programming question, or not related to the small number of pro-only features?) or at a smaller, segregated community where the only gatekeeping factor is one that doesn't actually relate to how well people can answer my question?

 

Valid point overload

 

I want a top row with all the advanced progressed games NOW.

Below the top row, a list of "Topics of the Week", with an emphasis on DEEP technical talk, picked up by UT moderators (I trust their choices).

Also, badges for the best contributors, like "Technical Guru".

ps: I can't understand this "Elitist" BS. I think EVERYONE wants to get better and learn from each other here.

 

Cool, looks like 30% of people on here want a more Pro less noise forum. Any suggestions as to what forum software to use as a base, I quite like vBulletin. But I also quite like whatever exchange uses but that seems better for a Q and A type thing. What I'd like is something that is a bit of both, a cross between Vbulletin and Q&A.

 

User Personalisation / Rewards
In general, my opinion is that each forum user should at LEAST be tagged with the license he owns (as to give credibility to his sayings) like "Pro 3.x, 4.x, team-license, android basic" and also a simple 'rating' system. Some users do actually spend a lot of time helping noobs on the forums, much more then on 'answers' and the ratings of that latter should also work for the forum.

Basically, giving a similar points system of 'Answers' to the forums. Its a proven learning construct, in e-learning, adding a reward system to anything will motivate people. How much and how exactly it is implemented is another subject; most agree that is has to be simple yet relevant. Adding 'points' left and right is often not the solution, but peer-review points work great.

Quality
At the end, it's not as much the 'noise' of newbie posts that bothers me but the relevance of the threads and how much you want to help other users. When Unity was smaller (you can see that from the quality of 2008-2010 threads) the community factor made people care more, and I think instead of segregating newbies, it should reward experienced developpers and make the less-experienced look up to them.

I would also like to have more of the Unity staff present on the forums with each thread that they answered tagged as 'Fixed - Approved Unity Solution" or something similar.

The rational being that as time passes, some of the old 2.x -> 3.x to now 4.x solutions to some problems don't apply at all. And searching for something, even if its a very precise problem, ends up giving solutions not applicable to each unity versions / the best solution found yet. This opens the door to a more robust meta-tagging of solutions.

It also has the bonus of already using the UDN system where your answers account is the same as the forums. Coming from a web-dev background, I know it's easier to say then do, but Unity definitely has the ressources to hire a few web programmers and link two DB together. From what I can see, this forum is an open-source app...

Filtering
And you can always think outside the box. Let's say before posting ANY thread, the forum searches itself 'unity answers' using the custom google queries we all use already, and gives you a top 5 of relevant threads. You actually have to review / discard those results before submitting the thread.

Is it perfect? No. Could it help filter 5%.. maybe 20% of re-posts? I think so!

 

After having read a large chunk of his blog recently, I think it'd be an awesome idea for UT to hire Jeff Atwood (one of the Stack Exchange founders) as a consultant for a bit to help improve the community systems here. The guy clearly understands both software development and community development, and his prior success speaks for itself. The goals of Stack Exchange more or less mirror exactly what people are asking for here, but achieve it in an inclusive way - rather than the exclusive, segregationist ways that people tend to respond in (see: this thread) when it hasn't been done quite right in the first place.

One of my favourite things about Stack Exchange is that newbies are made to click through a page of advice about writing a good question before they're able to actually post for the first time. And it's not just a yes/no thing - at the bottom of that page there's a huge "I can improve my question" button, followed by a small, normal hyperlink for "I'll post as-is... or something along those lines. The point is that people need to actually pay attention to that page at least once, and it does a great job of explaining to them that if they don't put effort into asking their question well, nobody is likely to give two turds about taking the time to answer it. (There's also a lot of encouragement towards "Rubber Ducking", which is essentially the art of asking a question in such a way that the answer becomes apparent.)

Sticking something similar in each section would probably be a good idea. It could remind newbies what a section is for, let them know what's expected of thread opening posts in the section, tell them how to appropriately title a thread, and even provide a search box and tell them to use it. At the bottom, when they've skimmed the list, there should be a small link that says "Yes, I do actually need to post a new thread".

 

One of the best forums in terms of signal to noise I've ever frequented is "elitist jerks", a wow forum. They have strict posting rules, they have a warning system, and they temp ban people that don't meet standards, followed by banning them if they are repeat offenders.

It's a tad Mother Russia but the result is a highly curated resource of information, where merit and accuracy tend to win the day. I'm not certain how you'd balance that with people that come for the hand holding.

Another concept that I employ here at work is "what have you tried?" - This is a standing rule where anyone that comes to me for help must first explain to me what they have attempted to do prior to asking me to get involved. What this brings is first to limit answer seeking as opposed to solution seeking. The second thing it accomplishes is that I can skip the first few obvious steps because they've already done them. Finally they tend to be well enough educated by the act of trying to solve their own problem that they can more accurately pose the question to me. As a filter goes I believe this is unparalleled.

 

Absolutely. In addition, I bet that it also nips a lot of questions in the bud before you're even asked, because in the act of going through the process of making sure they have a well formed question they end up answering it for themselves.

The mere fact of having some intelligent policy around the asking of questions could streamline things significantly.

I think the issue here isn't so much that we have sub-par posters or newbies as much as it is that there's nothing to guide them towards getting started on the right foot. This is to the detriment of the whole community. People who get started on the wrong foot are highly unlikely to grow into positively participating members themselves, because it's harder for them to learn and they're unlikely to get received positively. In fact, I bet that almost everyone here who has consistent positive impact to the Unity community is either Unity staff, or someone who had significant prior experience participating in online communities before they got here.

Aside from the standard rules and etiquette posts which almost nobody reads anyway, there's nothing here to get a newbie started on the right foot. Don't you think that's a bit backwards, considering that one of the goals of Unity is to make game development as accessible as possible?

 

Folks, when you are so unsatisfied with this forum here, why don`t you go out there, rent a server, and make your own forum? Nobody stops you from that. And there you can play god in any way you want.

 

Because the intend after all is to get a better support from Unity throughout their own forums. In a way they have identified this problem too. That's why they're making their Labs (especially phase I).

That said, there is a serious doubt if this will reduce the overall noise of questions that could be answered by Google, the docs or already asked questions. Also, a secondary target of forum change requests is to get either a better visibility of questions asked by paying users (pro users). This is both to the community itself but also better visibility towards Unity staff.

Putting this onto an outside server will not serve those targets.

And before I get comments about "But what about users who don't own a pro license but spend money on the asset store?": Those assets are/should be supported by those who produced them and put them onto the store.

 

Even though Unity gets a cut of all those sales.

 

So? I don't expect Apple or Steam to give me support for games I buy through them.

 

The point is that it's people who "gave Unity money for pro" even though a lot of people have given large sums of money to unity through asset store purchases. It's stupid to pretend that how Unity got the money matters. This is a simple matter of pro users going "I WANT THIS BUT NOBODY ELSE CAN HAVE IT" with really tenuous reasoning. Not to mention it also ignores other things, like how not every Pro license is bought through individuals and how there are other ways to give Unity license money like through iOS, and Android licensing.

 

Last I looked you couldn't release Android and IOS without Paying for extra licences! I think you are getting hung up on what some of us mean by pro. Pro means you bought a Pro licence OR IOS,Android etc. licences, basically everything except free. Oh and Metron is exactly right, Unity should not be supporting asset store stuff unless it's their stuff on it. The asset store publishers are where you get your support from for that stuff.

The main thinking is if you have purchased licences pro or otherwise you have made a financial commitment to unity and it's these users that do not get enough support for the money. Before you moan that we get pro features for the money, in my situation the ONLY pro feature I use is removal of the splash screen on IOS, this needed a Unity Pro licence $1500 plus the Pro $1500 IOS licence!

 

I would pay for a Pro forum, but not on external. It should be maintained actively by Unity staff.

 

I'd happily pay 500$/year for access to that (it doesn't even need to be a pro forum, just a paid forum, if someone only wants to buy support that's fine).

 

I would join a pro only forums, though I think it would create too much of a divide, and non-pro beginners would get less help with questions.

 

I would join a pro forums but like RG said it would create to much of a divide.

 

of course it will be a divide, that's the whole purpose. It is to separate out advanced topics from beginners topics.

 

No it wouldn't. The vast majority of advanced topics apply to both Pro and Indie.

 

It would sort people who pay for unity and the people who dont. not pros/indies. Ive met a bunch of utter pro user tools who dont know a thing about the industry.

 

That might be the intent, but that's not what you're actually doing. The intent is to filter topics, but what the proposed method actually filters is people.

What's more, it doesn't even filter people in a way that helps solve the core problem, which is support levels. In fact, it's likely to make it worse in many ways... But I'm not going into details while typing on my phone.

 

This poll would be useful if it was only Pro owners who could answer leaving the free users out of the equation. Because the free users votes will drown out the Pro users votes due to the imbalance in numbers, thus skewing the outcome of th wants of the Pro owners.

 

It would work better to have a pay per answer system for pros.
You pay Unity directly for answers , starting at 10$ a question . Their , since your making so much money it shouldn't be a problem .

 

I'd love that really, which is why i even suggested a 500$/year (unity managed, not third party) forum with guaranteed answer time. Read access is free, post access is 500$/year, it's just a paid support.