answers.unity3d.com beta

What's the news?

We've started the beta for http://answers.unity3d.com

What is it?

It's a Questions Answers site (in beta), that will coexist next to the forum. Right now it's still experimental. If you guys like it, we'll keep it. The idea is that it is much more suited for Questions Answers than the forum system is.

Will it replace the forum?

No. The forum is great for discussions and chat. http://answers.unity3d.com will hopefully be great for finding answers to your concrete questions.

Can I use my forum account on answers.unity3d.com ?

Yes. You can use any openid provider, or use your forum account. On the login page, just click on the Unity logo.

Why do you think it's better for Q&A than the forum?

Because we've seen it work on http://stackoverflow.com . In short, it allows for people to vote on answers, making the best ones float to the top. It also allows answers to be edited (even by others, if they have enough "reputation"). The system is built around "reputation" and badges. Reputation you can interpet as "how much does the community trust you". If your answers get voted up, you gain reputation. If your questions get voted up, you gain reputation. Badges can be earned for many different things. (First upvote, answered question that didn't have an answer for 2 weeks, etc).

These should incentive people to do what is most beneficial to the community.

We're very curious what the community's reaction will be. So if you've got a moment, please go ask a question, or answer one.

Bye,

Lucas

 

I haven't tried this yet, but are we able to post code samples and files in the answers also?

 

Code snippets? Yes, just like here on the forums (when you post you can include formatted code).

Downloadable sample files? No, I don't think so from what I recall/can tell.

 

can you make it so users like me who already have an account on the forum be linked like posts on there and here be linked and make it so that the reputation thing (if you have a forum account) with a certain number of posts increase your rep on there or something similar?

 

This is a really good idea and now I can get help faster, much much faster. Great idea.

 

In the longer term if/when we do migrate this into full-time use we definitely want a single sign-on so your forum credentials will match against those on answers.unity3d.com.

 

I think the format is great! It works well for stack overflow and I think it will work out here too.

 

While I'm always for trying new things and ideas, I'm going to cast my initial vote for "no" on this. Here's why:

Redundancy:
The forums and this new system essentially deliver the same information. I have already seen the similar questions asked in both places after some quick browsing. I'm now presented with even more searching in order to find the answers to my questions. It already takes a lot of time to go through all of the responses in the forums. I don't want to spend further time looking.

New Forums:
There are a lot of other forums out there support voting, editing, better searching capabilities (such as the simple ability to search for a string of text), and more. Best of all, many of them are free and easy to set up and migrate to. Why not upgrade the existing system, instead of duplicating the functionality already available in the forum format?

Final note, I think this topic should be moved to the 'Announcments' forum... ;p

 

I agree, contrary to what I said earlier. This would be a better idea.

 

Suggestion: To make it more visible, add another forum category "UnityAnswers" that is simply a link which redirects to http://answers.unity3d.com .

 

I just wanted to mention that I think answers.unity3d.com really rocks. I'm already hangin' out more there than on the forums and I think for asking / answering questions it's simply the way to go - it's much better than what a forum could ever do in that respective. And wow - it's fun!

The forums, on the other hand, are really great for discussing stuff. It's interesting to see that on the forum, I tend towards involving myself in discussions (which can be fun but is usually quite time consuming), while on answers.unity3d.com, I spend my time ... well, answering and asking questions; I've already learned a lot just browsing through the questions and their answers ;-)

So I see this as a perfect complementary tool to the existing communications infrastructure (forum, uservoice, bug-reporter, Wiki).

Kudos to UT once again for "just making things work" and keeping the community fun to participate in (the forums certainly have become kind of "difficult to handle" since Unity iPhone ... and Unity for Windows ... and Free Unity for All ;-) ).

 

I also cast my vote in fixing this forum's searching engine, instead of making one more resourse with just-as-bad search. Development forums NEED "search in thread title only" option, how am i supposed to find anything helpful, if i get a thousand barely related hits on any search i run ?

 

Hi,
I'm a big fan of http://stackoverflow.com and really liked it when I realized that you have http://answers.unity3d.com, because I just started playing with Unity and it's awesome!!

But you really have to fix some things there and one of the major ones is the colors that you are using! It's not really obvious when one question has now answers, or some answers, or the most important one if the have an accepted answer! I think you know what I'm talking about (red, green and green with yellow text in stackoverflow.com). Even if you are using the black and white skin, it won't harm anyone to have have some light green and light red to show that information. It's really important when you are browsing the question and it's not really hard to fix it

regards
Lipis

 

Just noticed this last week (duh, what is it with sticky topics turning invisible? ) and have pulled my profile over there.

Cool system, really liking it.

However I don't seem to be getting email alerts - I've ticked the "I'd like email notifications of activity on my questions and answers" button in the prefs, but haven't received any emails despite having a couple of comments.

Email address is set... anything else I need to do to enable these?

 

Check your spam folder.

 

+1 Most of the time folks say things like "I'm not getting notification emails" it seems spam filter related so give that a look and let us know if the issue persists.

 

Hmm, nothing in my gmail spam folder....
(though I really should have thought of that first )

I'm getting the alerts from the forum through OK, just nothing from unity answers.

 

It's not because of the spam.. it's how stackoverflow in general works..! They basically want you to be on the site instead of sending you bunch of e-mails.. the whole idea is a little bit different than any other service for these kind of things..

 

So was answers.unity3d.com a clone of stackoverflow or was source given to unity to use?

I honestly find it a useful format for finding answers to questions in a localized setting (Unity3D in this case).

 

It's a licensed version of essentially the same software used by StackOverflow.

 

Thanks for the response andeeee. It seems like they are using stackexchange. Not sure why I didn't notice the relation sooner. Also found this relevant bit: http://answers.unity3d.com/question...spond-to-the-changes-to-stackexchange-in-v2-0