Scripting forum and genuine help requests

I sometimes feel like at times that seem to match periods of the year in the educational sector, there is a rush of students asking for help in the scripting forum. This is fine.

Some other times, I cannot get myself to decide if some of these requests for help are genuine, or attempts at making fools of the ones who fullfill these requests. This is also fine, I stay away If I have doubts.

But out of curiosity, I have this pure demented twisted idea that maybe, just maybe, sometimes someone working at Unity might voluntarily request for help in a questionable fashion, just to test if the community and the devs are behaving ethically when answering. Sounds crazy, right ?

 

There's absolutely no reason to do this. If a Unity employee wanted to monitor the community then they could simply read the threads that already exist.

 

You can simply not respond when you don't feel like responding. You have no obligation to try to answer everything.

Yes. There's no point in doing something like that.

 

This is more or less what: "This is also fine, I stay away If I have doubts." imply. But I promess to improve my english

Even simpler, one would report said answer, he wouldnt need to search the threads at all.

 

It doesn't just sound crazy, it would be crazy if it were true. You can imagine people (probably I would one of those people) would leave the forum immediately. A company can't just troll their customers like that. Especially not those, who volunteer their time and expertise to help other customers to use their product. It would be a PR nightmare and immediate fall out. It simply doesn't worth it.

 

Yea... that is simply not happening. No one has the time to do something that pointless.

 

Not to mention Occam's razor applies here:

- there is an elaborate plan, someone somewhere is working extra hours to test community forums for vague ethical questions
- people are dumb

...

 

Just to clarify how pointless such excersise would be, is the fact that volume of questions are coming ever month. This gives enough measurable data, how community behaves.
Adding extra one testing question from the officials, would be at this point useless and none quantitive.

 

Here's a quick and easy solution for this dilemma: Write up a post like e.g. this or this one, save it somewhere on your PC and post it whenever someone needs help with an error on Line XYZ!

Works 100%, you don't have to really care about the user who started the thread. Win for everyone.

... and, maybe, Unity should consider closing the Scripting section for good if semi-automated posts is all what new people can expect nowadays. Or, maybe, someone may consider creating a knowledge base with FAQs and frequently given answers?
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