Dear Unity developers what's the purpose of Connect ?

Dear developers,
I understand you're trying to improve the users experience, but why? The forums just WORK. So far Connect has been a waste of time. And maybe because of the time difference, I live in Australia, I found when posting a question in Connect, I've received no replies.
And why have you moved the jobs board to connect? With everything developers have to do when making a game, modeling etc, weather you're solo or in a team it seems to me like another extra task to do, it's a chore, having to muck about with Connect when I can use the forums instead.
I believe in keeping it simple, so the forums does what it's suppose to do for me. Connect is just a negative experience, it's a pain.

 

Because of the time zone, I think Connect or forums can't solve your problem, you still can't get immediate responses in forums right?
But yeah I would prefer if Unity keeps it simple....

 

This subject has been covered at length. The consensus is that Unity does not care that we all preferred the forums; they are forcing us to use this shoddy beta system while they figure out what it's going to be in the future. There is a term for this that escapes me at the moment, but encompasses what is happening here: a company forces its user base to use a beta system that has very little thought behind its design, and thus they design it via the free feedback they receive.

 

Well as a fan of forums I'm immediately biased, forums aren't out of date and are still the most useful method of sharing data outside of newsgroups, beating discord and all modern attempts to go one better, if only because you can use google and utilise the solutions of so many other people.

But I can see connect growing into something useful - if we, the users, signal in a constructive manner what we would like to see from connect. In my case, I would like to see a serious place similar to linked in. I do not want to play happy families on connect. I want a place that's serious and focused enough for me to use money on - kind of like the ultimate unity-centric jobs board.

What you you guys want from connect?

 

Not social features and chatrooms.

 

I could bump my forum post every 3 days to find work via a forum thread that served me well as a way of showing off some of my work and getting potential clients interested in hiring me. There is nothing akin to that on Connect.

There seems to be this misunderstanding that we are simply complaining about Connect, and that is absolutely incorrect. I want to provide feedback and make Connect as good as it can be; my gripe exists in that they closed what was already working to force us to use a system that is still very much in beta. It is heavy-handed and not in the best interest of us consumers/users.

Slack/Skype exist as alternatives to the chat. In fact everything that exists in Connect exists elsewhere and IMHO falls short when compared to alternatives. The only thing that doesn't exist outside of Connect is a replacement for the job forums they removed. There is no other Unity-centric forum for finding work or hiring developers. Unity had the only one, and Connect is far from a worthy successor.

 

I want the old forums back. They worked, and every day spent without them is just a grinding inefficiency for my business.

Unity Connect is in no way close as a replacement, particularly when hiring for smaller tasks.

Unity, eat humble pie, listen to your community, just bring the forums back, please!

 

Hi Hippocoder, personally I don't have time for Connect. I tried it a few times and it just left me frustrated and angry. I think this is a problem when it comes to innovation, somebody just makes it and then says sorry later without any proper consultation from the community or planning. And also it's all nice when a company has the means and time to fiddle around with an app like Conect but in the real world people are pressed with time, resources and budget, that why I liked the Jobs section in forums, I could get to it quickly and read through the posts, simple.
If you are in contact with any of the guys from Connect, please tell them to stop this nonsense and put the jobs back on the Forums, and of course I'm happy to tell them myself.

 

Hey, @markp-unity is the man to talk to about connect, and general feedback.

 

Therein lies the problem. Everyone could bump their thread every three days. What this meant is that the chance of you being found from among many amounted to bumping your thread at just the right moment in time before it got drowned out in a sea of everyone else bumping theirs.

For the vast majority of the time it would have been just as effective to not be able to bump your thread.

 

I did not experience this at all. I regularly saw a big increase in emails anytime I bumped my thread. It did not fade into the ether nearly as quickly as you are implying and I would still receive occasional emails even after it moved to the second and third pages.

Regardless, I am not saying the forums were perfect, but they were much more effective than Connect.

 

in the old forums you could quickly glance whole page of thread titles and usernames,
and you were exposed to those offers daily when browsing new forum posts..

in connect, i have no reason to go there daily, 0 interest on browsing random feeds, or using chat or even trying to filter and search (probably returns 1 million users with c# skill added, even if they never really used it..)

compared to forum topics,
in few seconds you might see title "advanced c# coder with strong shader and physics background" and that would stick to your mind if you ever need it..
i dont think i'd find that talent in connect, even if search is improved?
unless i browse through every user that has used c#, shaders and physics
and perhaps sort by likes if he has managed to spam-gather those there..?


but at least the connect jobs section is quite nice, easy quick list of unity related jobs (although many of them written in a language that i dont speak, so those could be filtered somehow?)
https://connect.unity.com/jobs

 

Interesting. You're a single individual though. There are only a finite number of posts per page and there are only a small number of pages that people likely went through before they stopped. If your experience was the same as the majority of the people who used the forum it would suggest that the number of people who used the forum were relatively few.

Clearly it did work for some people, if the other thread is any indication, but I'd love to know if and for how many it didn't.

 

The forums were great for quickly glancing through and seeing who was offering what. Like an alley bazaar of talent placed on a sidestreet of the forums. I never go to connect and really have no reason to ever go there as a consumer. I would rather not bother with it at all.

 

The fact that my post didn't disappear onto page 4 on the first day day is not proof that it was being used by only a few people, it is proof-positive that the forums were effective. If I bump my thread twice over the course of the week and then do not bump it again for several months because they lead to a gig, that doesn't mean the forums are not working for me, it means the opposite.

Maybe others have had different experiences when it comes to the forums vs. Connect, but based off of this thread and my own thread concerning Connect, I am nowhere near alone.

 

A relative few (remember the total developer base for this engine is a few million). If we assume you're working off of the default setting for the forums of 30 threads per page, that's only 90 threads across three pages and one of them would have to be yours so there could only be 89 other people bumping on that one day.

If the other two days are similar for other people then the most we can have per three day period is a very small fraction of the community (even if we were to assume the community is a fraction of the total developer base). At most about 270.

 

Your math assumes that a fair percentage of Unity's entire userbase is seeking to hire people professionally when that's simply not the case. The overwhelming majority of "work" offered in this industry is profit/revenue share based, and they had their own section separate from paid work. The number of those looking to get hired is a very small fraction of the number of total users, active or not.

Userbase does not equal job offers or number of freelancers by any metric. You also cannot consider the number of people using Connect as a fair metric to measure its effectiveness vs that of the forums if the forums are no longer available.

I have found more work via Reddit and other options than I have using Connect by a long shot. Not only are other options more viable alternatives, but the quality of the offers is, on average, much higher. Reddit has specific systems in place to completely separate paid work from revenue share and their system works well; Connect pales in comparison in a lot of ways. If I post on the Connect message board today my week will be spent responding to offers and explaining that I do not work for revenue share. This simply did not happen with the forums, and I know a big part of the reason for that is mods like @hippocoder

If Unity staff is moderating the message boards, I have seen very little of it. I have, however, seen Unity users take it upon themselves to consistently point out when people are posting to the incorrect boards. If Unity's intention was to wash their hands of moderating then they've done a top-notch job, but it solves nothing for us users.

 

My math only assumes that the number of people using the forum were very small. I'm not assuming anything for Connect because I have very little information on it. If anything I've been working on the assumption people were using alternative methods. The forums were not the sole way to find work for people. If it was the game engine would never make it this far.

I'm primarily thinking of resources like LinkedIn or simply finding people through word of mouth.

I simply cannot believe that the majority of it is profit sharing. Profit sharing is just too hit and miss in the vast majority of cases unless you already know the people involved and at that point you're not posting asking for people.

For the forums we haven't had consistent moderation from the actual staff since Aurora... at least when she did it it was always very obvious she was doing it. If staff are still frequently moderating they're very silent about it.

 

For the record I have no problems with bringing the forums back. If anything I thought it was completely bizarre that they removed the relevant sections before their new solution had any real proof that it was going to work out for everyone and clearly it isn't working out for some.

 

The number of people complaining about the forums being taken away is not very small when you consider that anyone who would have used the jobs forums is a small fraction of the community. I wouldn't be surprised if those that have complained openly about the forums being taken away was a fraction of this small fraction of the user base. Most importantly, even if the user base was small, it doesn't belittle their voice or their opinion. They were users, some of them had a subscription with Unity and if they feel as though they are not being served or listened to, they have a right to voice their opinion.

According to Unity, one of the reasons they abandoned the forums was they were tired of them having to be moderated. I have seen numerous forum moderators state that they preferred the forums themselves, so either Unity threw them under the bus by making false claims, or Unity was in fact tired of moderating the forums themselves.

With 40+ threads a page, to get bumped to page 4 by day 3 you're talking 40+ jobs being bumped or posted daily. That's just one of the job forums that was available. Accounting for the fact that once a job is found, both the person hired and the one hiring would no longer be using the forums again, at least for a while, that is more than a very small number of users.

Either your argument that people would only go through so many pages when hiring is unfounded because nobody was using the forums enough to have pushed you past the first few pages, or your argument that nobody used the forums is unfounded, which would have resulted in your thread always being within the first few pages because it would have not moved very far down the line over the course of the 3-day grace period.

My point was that a lot of people used the forums and that they are unhappy with Connect. How often they used the forums is inconsequential; it affected them in a negative way enough for them to be vocal about it. The notion that my saying that my thread did not get bumped as quickly as you had suggested does not fly in the face of the number of people who used the forums; the people who posted in the particular forum I used may have not been a massive number, but the number of people who used that forum as well as the other job forums was. This also doesn't even account for the number of people who could have contacted me via my website - which was linked to in the thread - without ever having to login/sign-up for Unity. They used the forums but are excluded from Unity's user base, at least at the time when they contacted me.

My experience with the forums was that if I had a gig that was going to end in the next few days, I could bump my thread and often times have at least a meeting or two lined up for the day after I finished with my current gig. If I didn't, I could bump my thread again after 3 days.

There is no way for me to do this via Connect. My only option is to spend the time finding a gig, and when it comes to freelancing, time, like with so many other things, is crucial to maintaining a profit. This is not laziness on my part, it is a testament to the flow of the forums and the way that someone looking to hire a freelancer could have found me three days early without them ever needing to post to the forums. It worked for both sides of the aisle, and people from both sides of the aisle have complained openly about how broken Connect feels.

 

For what it's worth near the end, moderating that section was almost nil because everyone got the hang of it by that point. I think Unity is just trying new things. At some point you have to accept both things could exist. At least I'd do that, then people can perhaps (or not) see the benefits of having a connect account, and move to that (or not).