Dedicated forum team

I am not reading GL forum 99% of my post were in the 2D because I like it. And I have no idea what GL is. As the other said, all is depended how popular are the subforums. Some of them are bit dead, and other are like chat-canal.

 

Same, for the most part I get the answers I need, and appreciate anyone who contributes. I still think the original suggestion would be helpful for everyone.

 

Haha. You won't get anyone disagreeing with that statement.

 

Global Illumination

 

I'm getting at the fact that your entire premise is flawed and the only example you could come up with is not only old, but ignoring important context.

 

Well thank god, some middle ground

 

I wouldn't say so, but if you think so that is fine.

 

I don't know what I do wrong then, never get answers to my posts. Some examples

https://forum.unity.com/threads/dra...snap-and-other-productivity-questions.748859/

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-creates-unwanted-materials.730616/

https://forum.unity.com/threads/performance-regression-in-baking-light-with-enlighten.710243/

This one is a bit abstract
https://forum.unity.com/threads/disabling-items-in-inventory-a-question-of-domain.699698/

Though must give props to some of the UT staff, they do reply.

 

Only if by "a bit abstract" you mean "has nothing that really assists with us finding the problem let alone the solution". That thread is right up there with the people who post unformatted code with no actual information.

 

Some of the best answers I have got are from user "bgolus" Ben Golus. Props to him!

 

No, that was a very poor comparison. We ended up with my brothers solution btw

 

Yes, him, and that Kristy guy and engelsoft something

 

@AndersMalmgren

Maybe just isn't nobody who knows a good answer is all. Not like hiring some experts would mean those questions get answered.

I can offer a little about the material creation question cause I wondered same thing. But the answer is right in the documentation. I had searched a bit with no return, then I read an answer somebody was saying it's changed since 2018 so check the new documentation about how materials work. Dunno if it solves problem directly but finding simple workaround should be no brainer.

I'm not at computer now but I just changed workflow for importing and able to keep it all clean and tidy.

The kind of questions I ask are usually more basic and theoretical in nature. So easy to answer.

 

As @Ryiah said, you have did not gave much support data, to assist the problem.
In two cases, you should post scripts, which you have an issue with.
With other two, you should include reproducible issue, with file.

In either case, you haven't mentioned, which Unity you have used in the OP post, other than cases, when editor is actually visible.

So you haven't helped to assist your case much.

Probably texture issue case is best of these. But still, you should provide reproduction file.
Then you would have higher chance to get response from Unity team.

In basics, halve a** effort questions

We expect such post from newbies and leading by hand, but with all respect, you are suppose to be professional, as always claims.

 

I hear ya, and I won't justify low effort questions, but this is another example where a forum team could help, maybe not to directly answer the question, but to let the user know that, "Hey, we need some more information to help you with your issue".
Admittedly I think most of us are guilty of leaving important details out of a forum post in the past, it's easy to miss when caught up in whatever issue you are facing.
Receiving no answer at all, some people may assume no one knows or cares(when really they just left our required details), or assume the forum is inactive based on their experience, thus leading to these similar frustrations I mention in my first post.

Just my 2cents, maybe I am wrong.

 

People don't answer low effort posts or ask for clarification because it usually ends up being that they get a low effort response, even when asking for answers to specific questions. This is a problem I have experienced first hand in trying to get more information out of low effort posts. The most likely results are either "low effort post 2: electric boogaloo" or "the poster never responds."

Low effort posts don't get responses because they waste peoples time.

 

Well yeah.

As I indicated earlier, we have plenty of spare capacity in our existing forum members. You've seen that yourself with how many responses this post has had in just a few hours. If you can provide specific areas where the forums are dead, we can redirect some of that energy to those forums.

Or let me put the question another way. Lets say Unity showed up to this thread right now and thought you had a point. They offered to place ten new staff members on permanent forum duty. Which forum areas would you suggest they put them? What type of questions should they try and answer?

And then more relevant to my point, what can staff provide that the existing community can't?

 

While in some cases these posters may not realize their post would be considered low effort, like the fellow in this very thread who was mentioning GI and linked his other questions.

On the topic of low effort , a while ago I tried to answer this question https://forum.unity.com/threads/my-...f-the-mountains-clip-off.748511/#post-4994060
This question seems low effort, however I feel for the user as I understand it may seem like a world of confusion for him. Maybe I a wrong for "encouraging" such questions, but I see no issue with it, if anything it makes the forum a more welcoming place.

This suggestion I posed may very well be completely useless in practice, but I still think in theory a dedicated forum team could only benefit everyone.

 

I suggested having a small team of very experienced Unity users, part time or full time to assist with answering questions on the forums, not existing staff.
They could help with a range of issues from complete nooby questions, to very advanced problems.

I don't see an issue with the suggestion. If you deemed it unnecessary, well fair enough!

 

There is something to that.
However, contrary in my case, I maybe had 5 (if) of threads with no answers, over past 5 years.
I try detail questions as much is reasonable. Often during that time, I cancel question, as I find an answer (Rubber Ducking ).

 

The thing is, most people don't come here to school others on basic stuff like how to ask a smart question. It's implied that you know how to do this. What you suggest then is like a group of people sending a thousand responses daily like this: "listen grandma, you lack such a startling degree of basic human intelligence that there is no hope for you to ever make a game even if I told you precisely what to do every step of the way. You need to go back to school. Thanks for using unity, have a nice day."

Personally, I think 99 percent of issues beginners face arise from lacking core competency like this, but really showing somebody how lazy they are is beyond scope of forum. Plus it is very difficult thing to do without just stirring a big S*** storm. That's why most senior peoples just stick to answering smartly formatted technical questions. It's way cleaner.

Teaching how to think, speak, and act is what should happen in grade school. Doesn't mean I think it's waste of time to point out if I think a personal issue is the real problem and not a technical one, but most people don't wanna bother with that. Too touchy.

 

We're very much aware of what you've suggested at this point.

What we need from you now is to stop dodging our questions. If you can't link to the threads of your personal circle how about linking us to the forum sections themselves? I guarantee you they're not the only person who posted in them.

 

Adding a video that shows repro is low effort, ok, good to know.

 

So all you are suggesting is that people like me get paid instead of doing it for free? From a selfish perspective I wouldn't turn down a paycheck. Nor would any of the other forum regulars. But from a business standpoint, paying for something that people are willing to give away for free is a non starter.

The only real argument for your case would be if there are simply not enough experienced regulars on the forums already. But as yet I haven't seen that being the case. And this is what pretty much everyone on this thread is trying to say with asking for examples.

 

While I agree answering a concise question is much more clean and straight forward, the beginner stage is still a vital stage of learning, and the more "beginners" Unity keeps around the better. The more the community grows the better.

 

Yes, except I hope you don't spend 30 hours a week answering forum questions.

 

Yeah, maybe unity should endorse a preschool to teach people basic logic, communication skills, and internet 101?

I feel like you aren't taking time to really consider the situation as it exist right now, and just want to score some kind of victory point here. I mean what you are saying is great, but it's extremely vague and you aren't making any serious effort to demonstrate how your solution is actually a solution.

You've made the assertion here. You should be explaining things, not we.

All things always boil down to who is willing to do the work and who just wants to talk about doing the work. Which one are you?

 

Pfft. Won't be necessary long term. My local school which is very backwards and slow to adopt new technology has already transitioned to using laptops starting at the low grades of elementary. Twenty years from now you had better learned these skills or you will be getting replaced by the youngsters who will have picked them up alongside their everyday skills.

 

A lot of times, I think, it's not knowing how to do Google search, it's williyngness to close out all the distractions and actually do it.

Which just goes to show the stupidity of laziness. It's way easier to search, find, and read answers than to type a forum post and wait. And deal with peoe calling you lazy.

I think people do it because they want to avoid responsibility basically. Don't trust themselves to do stuff on their own. It's a pattern you see a lot. They ask a question like "What pplycount should my character be?" And someone gives nuanced answer about the many considerations they'll need to be aware of to make the decision for themselves. Also they post lots of links to further reading. Reply is then, "but like, is three hundred too much?"

And you know what is going on. They did ten minutes of work, ran into one issue, wrote a forum post, opened youtube, and just want to watch let's play until a simple answer magically appears. Way too lazy to be making games. Feeding that is giving drugs to a junky.

 

Again, I see some questions going unanswered on the forum, a dedicated full time or part time team to answer these questions could potentially help the community.

I won't go and pull every single "valid" question that has gone unanswered.

If you are intrigued to find such questions, browse areas of the forum you would usually not... And If you deem every one these unanswered questions are not valid nor warrant a response, well then we are fine as is and my suggestion is not necessary what so ever & no more discussion is to be had.

 

Yeah, that is what everybody saying. Didn't agree with you. Not a big deal. Can avoid the lengthy arguments lot of time if you determine not to spend more than like two post defending or justifying yourself. Lot of time if you carefully reread others post you'll realize what they saying it's pretty sensible. None of the regulars is idiots.

 

Once more, its just a suggestion. Attempts to convince me my suggestion is invalid gets us nowhere, does it?
I am fully aware this suggestion could be useless in practice.

From my second reply on this thread I said -

Remember It takes two to tango.

I will leave it at this.

 

Many of them in this thread.

 

Maybe the new forum team can pick up my loose ends

 

Hobby. Dangerously addictive obsessive mental compulsion. I'm not one to split hairs on semantics.

 

I've worked forum moderation. I've answered stuff here. When you routinely post things in those badly written question threads that amounts to, "This is how you ask a question properly so that we can actually help you," you end up being called an unhelpful control freak jerk -- or other things far less flattering. While some people will indeed post the necessary information once you point out what is needed and how to better ask so they get an answer, many people give you even more useless stuff or outright anger in response.

When I got paid to answer questions on a forum, I kept pushing for proper information despite the flack I received because that was my job. It's a terrible and frustrating job. Some people will appreciate what you do, many will hate you.

If I am answering questions here or on another forum because I enjoy it, I feel it is a waste of my time to answer posts for people who don't bother putting any effort into the question. I know from reading multiple posts from our regulars here that I am not the only one who feels something like this.

Other than the Unity staffers who are dealing with actual bug reports, I do not think having a "support team" for the forum who are tasked with answering as many questions as possible is a good idea. This is a resource Unity can better apply elsewhere. Such a staff is either going to waste a ton of time responding to the same basic questions and half-asked garbage over and over -- which means those users are never going to learn the necessary skills of how to do research and ask questions -- or the staff is going to end up having to post, "Here is how to ask a question," over and over and generate ill will. Either way, this does a disservice to the community, not provide it with a service.

The only change I'd suggest for getting questions answered is for the forum to require everyone to read a guide on how to post a good question before being allowed to post anything on this forum. While it's generally more aligned to civility on those forums, there are indeed forums that require you to read a small guide before posting. I remember Jeff Atwood posting an article along these lines. I think it had to do with Stackexchange, but a few searches of his blog has not turned up the article, unfortunately.

 

You mean I can get paid for this stuff?!

 

Have the title changed? Paid dedicated forum team seems like a waste of resources if you ask me.
I wonder though why the rest of the forum is such a desert when general is blooming

 

Cause general is just for goofing off. Others is for when you are working.

 

Killing time bro.

 

General is where the only real moderation is just making sure people are actually speaking about something vaguely about tech or moaning about tech.

You'll notice I mod harder elsewhere and I already floated the OP's ideas past Unity a few years ago. Unity's response is to encourage actual staff a bit more, I think they may have done some lightweight hires as well.

The problem with hiring people do forum stuff is

a) they're probably not going to be as much of a unity geek as me or know as much about unity
b) they have to be essentially the developer or their knowledge gets outdated too fast - even the docs team lags bewilderingly behind cos of the rate of change.

Would you rather Unity hire more people to pump energy into Learn and Docs or would you hire people to be out of date on forum and not even best me at general Unity knowledge?

It is one or the other because you need a similar amount of dev info/knowledge. So just hire more docs / learn staff instead while encouraging all staff to post more, IMHO.

I mean for years I had to mod people to behave correctly toward staff to facilitate an atmosphere where staff felt they could post without being attacked. Indeed some still don't post due to inbox harassment they've had. Sad but true.

 

Excellent point. I would much rather see documentation properly updated than someone at Unity wandering the forums looking for questions that need answering. The documentation is helpful to everybody. (Or at least that subset of "everybody" who bothers to read it anyway...)

 

I mean personally I would prefer option

c) where unity instead just send me an enormous cheque with the money instead of spending it on sensible things and then I can just put commercial game dev to bed and ride off into the sunset laughing whilst I release a spew of semi-finished bogus games that will never ever make any money and are based around concepts I dreamt up whilst drunk like "man with 5 arms is a store checkout assistant, but another man with 4 arms is trying to tickle him. Scan the food but fend off his tickly arms".

But seeing as that isnt an option right now, Ill take what we currently have

Yes, it is the end of the day here at work, in case you cannot tell.

 

Never heard about such things in software dev before. Unity are in a strange position. They do not target end users but many of their target customers are no better than end users.

 

Unity's customers are everyone, which is a situation most software developers would absolutely love, according to bank managers worldwide.

 

Replace actual Unity staff with non-technical forum staff who will just parrot what they are told without understanding it? Sounds like the worst idea.

It'll be like dealing with tech support. I'm currently dealing with them for Red Dead Redemption 2 and it's useless. They just have a copypasta for the non-'solutions' users have already suggested. It's beyond a joke.

You get good responses from Unity staff here, especially in the beta forums, for example the new UIElements section.

 

Its much easier to deal with professionell dev's, listen to your own story from earlier.

 

Good to know I’m not the only one who thought of this

Agreed, it would be difficult to execute effectively.
Perhaps a small team of moderately experienced users in their specific field.
Eg. You would have your experienced audio guy watching over the audio sub forums.

I have learnt many a thing from a wide range of skill levels, even beginners have taught me some hotkeys/shortcuts I didn’t know about. I imagine a good fraction of questions could be answered even with moderate experience.

Thinking further, may be best they worked in conjunction with the existing active staff on the forums. Maybe forwarding the more complex questions to one of the Unity Staff who work on that part of the engine, and they can hop in.

Difficult to execute well.

Just some thoughts.

 

Take my money.

 

If for whatever reason Unity chose to hire a forum team that was useless at Unity, well that would be pretty useless, wouldn't it.

The distinction between some call/chat center giving copy pasta answers VS a small coherent team of Unity professionals spending extra time on the forums. I would hope for the latter.