Feedback Could this forum work better with version related sub-forums?

ECS or DOTS or Tiny is changing and quite often, yet unlike the Beta forums that track specific build versions there is only one forum for DOTS/ECS (ok there is a seperate one for Tiny).

In theory it could make looking for help or examples easier as they would be in that versions sub-forum.

So could this forum work better with version related sub-forums?

 

Not enough traffic yet, IMO.

 

I don't see what the point of staying on old versions is when it's in preview and I'm pretty sure bug fixes aren't backported. The only help anyone on old versions is likely to get is to upgrade.

 

The Beta forums are separated by major versions, which there are only three of each year. I think doing the same thing for dozens of minor preview releases would create an unmanageable level of fragmentation.

A better idea would be to make a sub-forum for each package (Entities, Jobs, Burst) or just encourage people to always state which version of a package they are using. Maybe the admins could even add some kind of version tagging system which you would have to set?

Also technically speaking I don't think the Entities 0.0.12 and Jobs 0.0.7 packages have changed version since release. Only the "preview" number has gone up. So this wouldn't really apply to them.

 

Instead of version specific, I think topic specific subforums would be better.

 

It’s not relevant. Cos im most cases big part of things not changes across versions, and old posts can be actual.

 

What about the big API deprecation that happened or the removal of [Inject], would that have been a good point to 'branch' the forum?

 

For that we have release notes, changelog, new documentation directly in package manager

 

OK your an experienced developer who is I think working with and on a DOTS project and you are used to the forum and checking all the right places for the updates and changes.

What about developers less experienced or new to this aspect of Unity, they hit a 'chaotic' changing system with a forum that has outdated questions and answers with only a few simple sample projects and some often outdated videos/tutorials to work with.

What if they instead had a subdivided forum where the latest version had it's own sub and the questions, answers, samples and information were all up to date and using the current API?

 

In this case it's honestly best to just wait until DOTS is production ready and has official documentation and better tooling available.

I'm afraid there's really no way to effectively reduce the amount of chaos and the steep learning curve at this point while everything is still in preview. These preview packages are really only meant for use by the most daring and experienced developers who can handle this and provide valuable feedback to improve them before official release.

This is not to say I think the process can't be improved somewhat. I've actually been trying to restructure the official wiki to help newcomers learn DOTS more easily, but there's still a ton of work to do there and this is no simple task. So who knows if I can make that happen while it's still in preview.

 

I find a lot of my search results are riddled with duplicated, outdated, and rather empty hits. I worry I contribute to this annoyance with my own threads from time to time. It's not uncommon for search result threads to have a "this is a duplicate thread" comment as well. Sometimes it's hard to gauge what unmentioned version is being discussed since the date of the post doesn't necessarily correlate to the latest release of that time.

What jumps to mind is tagging, though I'm not confident in the idea:

Tagging could be manual title tagging "[example]", or actual tags like 'Feedback'. I'm not sure if actual tags are meant for what's in mind though. I lean towards manual title tagging, but there's problems with that:

Title tagging would be an unenforced community convention, which I have little faith in the adoption of. A pinned post containing common "[title tag] : definition" might help though, and could receive tag suggestions through comments.

That said, even if the majority would adhere to a title tag convention there would still be loads of older threads that don't implement this convention. Furthermore, community enforcement would likely result in threads receiving off-topic and necro-ing "add / remove this tag pls" comments, which would arguably be more annoying than sorting through the current search results as is.

 

..or they can hire some moderators for that purpose. But I get your point. @TheGabelle

 

Could Unity run their script API migration system against the forum and translate solutions to the latest version?

 

Sub-forums would fragment the knowledge too much.

But using pre-defined tags in forums are really useful for that!
Tags can contain Unity version, platform, SRP (or no SRP), assembly (?)