can we remove rookie questions from forum?

Since I am myself a rookie (in unity I mean) every time I come to the forum It's plenty of rookie questions that are easy to respond with only google It, leading some other more complex questions behind in the forum, so is there a way we could just mark a thread as rookie so after some number of marks it could b removed to focus on complex issues. How does It sound to you?.

 

First, this is not a scripting question and should go in the meta forum.

Second, I'd be much happier with removing posts that don't include their code, don't use code tags, don't copy&paste their exact error messages, don't describe their problem clearly, etc.

Finally, this forum isn't just for "complex issues" is the thing. It's to facilitate people learning about the wonderful tool, and most of the people who need to learn are.... rookies.

 

That's not incredibly fair toward rookies, to be honest. Yes some questions are complete waste of time and forum space, but this is also an official place for those as well. However, I wish there was a more advanced section or subforum that would be more open to mature discussions.

 

Not sure to understand what you want to achieve.

1st it's "easy to respond with only google It" because google is gonna lead you to those "rookie" questions and thus solve your rookie problem.

And if your problem is more complex than surely using more specific keyword should lead you to more specific answer ?

Or are you just talking about casually scrolling the unity forum ?

So i'm not sure what you meant, but removing topics doesn't seems like a good idea, as a populated forum is much more resourcefull

 

My opinion, you'll learn more if you start a thread about a particular topic you are ready to learn more about rather than scrolling through a list of "advanced" topics. Curating out "rookie" questions would be subjective, a lot of work, and of questionable value.

 

No, but there should be a 'hide threads from people who are complaining about their threads not getting replies' option.

Just a joke. Having people use [SOLVED] in the title could help.

 

I don't mind rookie questions. I do mind that most rookies seemingly have no idea how to debug... it makes everything so much more painful for everyone involved... They often also seem hesitant to learn how to debug, outside of Debug.Log statements.... Maybe they think the debugger is too advanced for them. It isn't.

Learn how to debug, it takes about 15 minutes to learn how, and it will make your life so much easier... and people on the forum wouldn't have to play what is sometimes a 48 hour guessing game trying to find the source of basic bugs like a null reference, or why a piece of code is not being called. You could have found that bug in a relatively short amount of time and effort, and you would have learned so much more by doing that yourself.

Even if you can't find the source and fix the bug, it will usually give you a lot of insight, that will help other people help you solve the problem in a fraction of the time.

 

Rookies don't bother me in the least.

Who bother's me... the person with 4 posts who comes in demanding an answer to a vague question. And if you don't hand them the EXACT answer that they can copy paste into their code they act like you've wronged them and must not know what you're even doing. And I'm just like "I will reach through this screen and pull out every one of your hairs one by one no matter how long it takes!"

Oh and there was that one guy who threatened to kill me and started like trying to dox me in a PM... he got banned.

 

The issue I see is most "complex problems" are simply a bunch of "rookie problems" put together, so if you were to remove the "rookie problems" you'd really end up with very little.

Plus, several of the "complex problems" I see are, "Please HELP I have this due tomorrow and I can't figure out anything, can someone just write it for me because I'm bad at coding!"

So to answer your question, no. Everyone starts somewhere. Just as long as a person actually wants to learn and not just want the work done for them, I'm happy to try to help. Even if it's just to point them to a resource.

 

I don't think complex questions actually get left behind. Most threads that can get an answer seem to do so.

The questions I most frequently don't see answers to are the ones where not enough information is provided, ones specific to 3rd party libraries not commonly used in Unity games, and ones where someone is trying to do something otherwise not commonly done in Unity games. On the later two, the Unity forums may be the wrong place to even ask such questions.

edit:
Another topic I don't see a lot of answers to is people asking for specific tutorials. The reason I believe is that experienced Unity users haven't used a tutorial in many years, so can't recommend any. The people still in the middle of doing tutorials are more likely to ask questions than jump from thread to thread trying to answer them.

 

Most rocky questions are probably in Getting Started and Scripting forum sections. Maybe also 2D forum?

Level up, are probably Game Design forum section, where people discuss approaches, rather specific code.

Of course we got Graphics, Physics and Multiplier forums ranged with variety of questions complexity.

Them we got WIP and few more other forums, including Dots, which are more advanced areas for discussions.

Just my thought.

 

Then how would we argue about how to do simple things?

Just kidding. I come here to answer rookie questions. Removing them would make me feel way less smart.

 

One of my ways of learning a new subject is to find beginner questions, research the subject and gain an understanding of it, and then answer the questions. For people like me removing the beginner questions would be both good and bad. We'd have the more advanced questions more easily found, but we'd lose the beginner questions that helped us get started.

 

I believe the problem isn't basic questions flooding the forum. What is missing is curation. Tags assigned by the poster, tags voted on by readers, and filters which allow the reader to only see threads with tags they want, I believe would make looking out for threads relevant to any forum lurker much easier. Ideally this can also lead to less repeat questions since threads talking about a problem wont be "flushed away" by new posts.

 

If we did that, it would just come off as hostile to beginners. Which really this forum is mostly for beginners. To be fair most people who are just learning do not even know the right questions to ask which makes something like a answers page hard to use. In the forum format things can flow in a much more conversational way and people can be more effectively taught if they do not know the terms they need to use yet.

Also do we really want the culture to devolve into what stack overflow is?

 

What could be done is creating separate sections to post scripting questions. One for beginners and one for the more intermediate and advanced. But then the question would rise, when is something no longer a beginner question but an intermediate question. You’ll get annoyance there. But even then questions have to be asked and solved before it can be googled. If you’d remove beginner questions then those questions are no longer answered leaving more questions and frustration for beginners.
Another way of splitting beginner and advanced unity developers would maybe be splitting by years of experience. I’m using unity for about 6-7 years by now. But even that is questionable. Because someone with a year experience could still have learned nothing (yes those ppl exist)
And again theres a fine line how many years are you going to split.

so tldr; it’s difficult to split beginners and intermediate/advanced questions if people themselves have to look subjectively in what section to post in

 

I can see the value of creating separate beginner/advanced forums for the most popular topics. I don't think years of experience is a good criteria though. I started using Unity with 4.0 and can contribute to a few topics at a fairly advanced level, but if I asked a shader or animation question I'd be right there with all the beginners

Game dev is a very large set of skills which I'd be surprised if anyone was at an advanced level in all of them at the same time.

 

+1 for beginner forum, where you can ask about any unity related topic.

 

You mean Getting Started ?
Mind, anything less meaningful, will only confuse beginners.
We got enough questions in Editor & General Support, completely unrelated to the forum section.

 

oh nice, that looks perfect for it.