Difference between posting in Forum versus Answers

So just wondering why there are two places to post questions/answers?

Why a Forum section and an Answers section? It just makes it more confusing when searching for answers to a problem because you have to do two searches, one in the Forum section and one in the Answers section.

Thanks

 

Good answer to this question in this thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/th...s-an-attitude-adjustment.297683/#post-1961218

Essentially, UA is like Stack Overflow, while the Forum is like Stack Exchange. One for straight up technical answers, and the other for more open discussion.

 

At the high level: UA is designed for technical questions that have a single correct answer. The forums are designed for discussion.

Getting down into technical details:

Answers has a mod queue. Noob questions that have been frequently answered get filtered out. The forums does not.

Answers is meant to be a long term archive. In theory there should only be one version of each question, answered well. The forums are not as restrictive, the same discussion can come up multiple times. As a side effect of this its considered bad practice to necro a thread on the forums. On answers necro is good practice.

The forums are chronologically arranged. This allows for follow up discussion. Answers is not well suited for follow up questions.

Answers has a karma and voting system. The community votes for which answers they like, and which they do not. This gives you a better feel for who knows what they are talking about, and who should be ignored. On the forums you are required to use your own judgement.

Answers is community moderated. Anyone with the karma can go modify questions, delete questions, close threads and so on. The forums have fewer moderators, and in general they only take action if you actively break the forum rules, such as being insulting or attempting to steal IP. On answers a question will get closed and removed for far more trivial reasons, sometimes as simple as formatting errors.