Unity, Thank You for Listening to us

I just want to say Thank You to Unity for listening to use about the state of the Forums.
While we all understand that change is necessary, with our group it has to be done a bit slower.
Thank you for putting the old forums back while you further test out the new.

 

Nice, isn't it?

 

This.

It couldn't have been easy for the community team to make the call to rollback. Admitting you fubbed up is one of the hardest things for anyone to do.

Everyone makes mistakes, but Unity is doing good work addressing the ones they've made recently. The changes to the "plus" plan, and the forum are great examples of being flexible, listening to your customers and being willing to redress issues.

Good job UT. It's actually very reassuring that the company is taking issues seriously and acting quickly to remedy them.

 

They couldn't revert back without losing information so still incompetent.

 

That's all on Lithium.

 

In all fairness, I dont think that there was anything on the Lithum forums except complaints anyhow.

 

Some tried to continue old threads, but with images disappearing it was a mess.

 

I must say UT is my favourite when it comes to owning up to mistakes

 

It's morning again on Unity Forums!!

Now that we're officially back online, I can thank them. Thanks for being able to be big enough to admit you made a mistake and following though on bringing us back rather than doubling down on your mistake and just hoping you could eventually get a new community willing to put up with a substandard system.

So one of the first orders of business should be contacting all the people who left and getting them back here

I saw @Ony in the feedback thread, and I think I saw @hippocoder as well, we just need to get @zombiegorilla and @BoredMormon and a few others whose names escape me at the moment and let them know

As I mentioned before, another thing we need is more transparancy on this process. It felt like it was mostly sprung on us, and during the event, response to our feedback was quite sparse. Before we make these decisions, perhaps the community should be consulted more, and more of the reasoning should be made clear. As developers, some among us might be knowledgeable about these things and might be able to come up with solutions that help everyone get what they want.

 

It's astounding at just how much superior this forum is than that new "latest & greatest" (at least I think that was the idea) attempt.

Not just visually and functionality but just in raw speed. Not sure if anyone else noticed but that new forum was so darn slow. It took seconds many times just to Like a post. This forum is blazingly fast in comparison.

I don't see why they want to change this in the first place. If it is just looks they can always style this one a bit here and there.

 

I do honestly believe that there were great intentions involved in making the decision that they did.
The existing forums system has become bloated and it's a burden on them to maintain resources for.
There are some good ideas with trying to merge the support into one place, but at the same time this really needs to be studied before making snap judgements (Merging Answers and Forums).

 

Citation needed on this whole post, I think.

Xenforo is top-tier forums software that routinely handles sites FAR more traffic heavy than the Unity Forums and there's no complaining of bloat from them. MacRumours, for instance, runs on Xenforo just fine. If anything, Unity isn't using the software to its fullest extent.

 

(God I missed this feature!)

Well, heres the thing about that, I think those should stay seperate. I just go to answers if I want a quick answer to a question, the format is different and more suited for that sort of thing. I come here if I want something a little more indepth, that may require actual discussion or more details. Or for all the other features the forum has, like WIP or right here in General Discussion to discuss more general concepts of design with other designers.

Not to mention that hilarious and sad exploit that @CaptainMurphy discovered where he was basically giving himself free solutions.

 

That may be the case, I was basing my statement off of what Dorian (the guy who oversaw this rollout) said was part of the reasoning.

 

LOL, I may have accidentally found that exploit myself a few time....maybe

 

Just noticed the old forum is no longer read only, and hell yeah, this feels like home!

Its a lot more comfortable posting here

 

Sure, but nobody checked it while in progress, obviously. Or at least they didn't listen to beta testers FOR ONE SECOND.

It doesn't feel bloated. It loads pages faster, and it only loads the portions which change for most actions (clicking likes, replying and posting, looking at userinfo).

 

This is exactly what I don't like about the new forum software, It feels more like future different from other forums I have used. I am not sure if there is a technical term for this, but if Unity once again change to another forum software, this is one thing that cannot go.

Lithium feels a lot more clunkier with partial page loading and quick reply box missing.

 

Right, I agree 100%.
I'm saying from their perspective, they had "good intentions" and that their reasoning (however misguided) was that it was bloated etc...

 

I have already contacted Ony and I am sure Hippo knows. The others will figure it out soon.

 

I would not hate the idea of them using a points/voting system like they do for bugs/features in the engine.
Where Forum users can vote on what they think is important.
It would be a better way to democratize those kinds of changes

 

If anything felt bloated in terms of performance, it was the new software, which for me, actually loaded slower and , while I have no hard data on this, it seems like it used more ram. Yesterday with the same pages open with the only difference being the new forum vs the old forum, my rainmeter said I was using ~5 GB of ram, while right now, I'm only using 4.1 GB. This is not any hard science, just something I observed and might need to look into.

 

The Lithium forms made much heavier use of Javascript and had a LOT more going on in the CSS, so yeah it was taking a lot more compute cycles just to load and maintain.

 

No, it was a sensible choice given the circumstances, and me and other members of the community explicitly said it's ok to nuke a weeks worth of content if we get our old forum back. They did outstanding work rolling the forum back!
To be honest I think it is a good thing we've lost that week of posts. It had turned the forum into a depressing place. When I finally wanted to read a non-complaint thread again (the one on open source volumetric lighting) I just saw another member announcing to leave the forum. It was a perfect example of what I predicted would happen.

Now that Unity listened to us and gave us back the forum(software) that we love, my faith in them is fully restored! Thank you so much to @SaraCecilia and @aliceingameland, and also to all the unsung heroes we'll never know about, that may have helped make our wish come true! We're super grateful to have the best gamedev forum back and having seen how bad things can get I'm sure we won't any longer take it for granted how frigging great XenForo actually is!

It takes a lot of guts to admit mistakes and take the necessary steps to salvage the situation. I have nothing but respect for everyone involved in making those calls, and you really have a reason to pat yourselves on the back for this. You saved the community from falling apart, quite literally. These were desperate times for all of us. I did lose sleep over it myself the first night, and I was so mad it made me dizzy for a whole day. What @SaraCecilia and @aliceingameland have gone through must have been 1000 times worse! Given the amount of negativity thrown your way I have to say you two have held yourselves outstandingly well! Many would have had a meltdown, but you braved the harshest of storms and you can be proud of that. I'm sorry some of us went way too far and I hope you'll never have to face that kind of harassment again.

I'm sure we've all learned tremendous amounts from all this and won't be making the same mistakes in the future. My faith in Unity truly was shattered, and by returning here it has been fully restored! I'm looking forward to start my next project using Unity and to staying part of this greatest of all communities! Hindsight is 20/20 and of course some things could have been handled better, but my promise stands to not hold grudges if you give us our one and only forum back. We've seen that you care and we've seen that you listen! For our screams to mean something we must now return to the civil and constructive discussions that we used to have here. Time to extinguish the burning torches and put the pitchforks back into the closet.

There are a few things I want to stress as a takeaway from the whole experience, because I think they can easily get overlooked in light of all the emotional baggage we've been carrying around on both sides of the trenches:

The event showed how much the community is willing to invest into itself.

Imagine a parallel universe where the switch from XenForo to Lithium was not a company decision but the work of an evil hacker who also destroyed all the XenForo backups. Context is king. I'm pretty sure if that had been the situation - even with the exact same broken lithium trainwreck - the community would have stood strong and united behind Unity, and we'd have fought together for a better future. We'd have had a spirit of "We'll survive, we'll rebuild!", simply because we care and because of a different context for the cataclysmic event that happened.

The community is your greatest asset and you haven't yet used the full potential that we can offer you. You've seen how within days we've had multiple custom CSS solutions to make the forum visually bearable again. You've seen a lot of people with web-dev experience and first hand forum hosting experience come forward and offer help and advice. Someone suggested to involve us in your process by - for example - letting us do the first round of research and I think that is a good idea. Regarding lithium all that pain (and most likely metric tons of lost money on your part) could have been prevented. E.g. look here:
http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/li.htm

It sure caused the forum to explode and the pain in our eyes (before we rolled our own CSS fixes and you changed the font) was no joke!

I'll happily volunteer to help shape the future of our forum by giving feedback and making suggestions. I've got a degree in communications design and can give you my professional opinion on design and layout choices. I've always been one of the designers that put readabilty and functionality above design-hipster-fancyness. Judging by the people I studied with, we actually are a minority among designers.

I can't offer much technical advice, but it seems like we've got a few seasoned web-devs in our ranks and I'm sure they'll be happy to look into alternatives to Lithium. But to really be able to help you, you need to share more information with us about what you need. We know it's scary to become more transparent, especially for a company getting so much flak for other things already. But I really think the way forward needs to be paved with better communication from both sides.

Personally, I see Lithium as the villain in all this. What they have done to Unity looks like a straight up scam to me. Their software is in no way fit for purpose. Someone mentioned how many clicks it takes to quote a post and reply in the Lithium forum compared to this one. I wouldn't be surprised if Lithium does these things by choice and not because of incompetence. Just imagine a website tracking user clicks as a metric for engagement. Switching to lithium easily could double or tripple that "engagement" if you only look at the numbers of clicks.

I know datamining and analytics are all the rage in several markets, but please don't forget: these things are made to get valuable information on things that you would not be able to get in any other way. E.g. analytics are great to see where in a mobile game is a sharp user drop off after a certain level because it's too hard. You wouldn't get that data otherwise because the users aren't engaged enough to tell you.
But we are different, we are torches-and-pitchforks levels of engaged already ^^. You can just ask us anything you want to know. We'll gladly tell you and help you shape your services to become better for everyone.

Personally, I think Lithium is scorched earth. I don't think anyone in the community is able to believe that it's the best solution out there. Even if it actually was (maybe given all background data that you haven't shared with us yet?), it would be more than a hard sell, simply because we've seen how much it sucks. None of the other big companies that use it seem to have communities that work in a similar way as we do. Their auto censoring of competing products is straight out of some sci-fi dystopia, and functionally Lithium compares to XenForo like a dead bird to a cat. Sure, in theory the bird could fly, which is cool, but it's dead and stinks and won't ever fly again. But we've got the most wonderful cat right here, alive and happy to have us back! (=^・ｪ・^=)

Let's all work on this together and explore posibilities to make this community even better and avoid possible health hazards along the way. E.g. Wiki reboot. I think you had a great idea there! The old one seems terribly outdated in places and reasonable concerns regarding the license under which code snippets are offered have been made. I'd suggest to just ask us to assemble a few volunteers to fill a new wiki from scratch with better content that can be offered under MIT license. You've seen how much this community cares. I like to think that the terrible "Lithium incident" just brought us closer together and we'll all emerge stronger and more united than ever from this. We can make a new wiki, we can work together. We don't need a shared database or badges and ranks for that to happen. You don't need fancy data mining and gamification to get us to do things.

I am genuinely happy and relieved that we have gotten back what we feared to lose. Thank you so much!


P.S.: All your community managers and forum database administrators etc. have more than earned yourselves some paid bonus vacation and tons of ice-cream to recover from the past week. Just throwing it out there in hopes your bosses read it!

 

Lets just not forget that this isn't over yet.

It seems like switching stuff is still on their agenda. We need to make sure that we don't end up getting burned twice on this

And by the way, though some of my own personal sluthing during this whole thing, it seems like a bit of the Unity staff is already on vacation. The Senior Community manager went on vacation a day or two after the forum rollout.

 

I am at a loss for words....

 

It makes me question that guy's true motivations, given that this bloatedness talk seems to be mostly debunked.

It's almost like he forgot that we're a forum of developers and can't be fooled as easily by technobabble.

 

Martin, that was all well thought out and written.
I know that I was about in full on rage mode when things were at the worst, I joined the troll mob and just help inflame the situation. You are correct about the heros of the incident, the ones who were making solutions and offering help.

I do hereby apologize fo my venom in the dark times, and will try to remember the aspects of community here.

 

How many of us almost immediately opened up developer console in our browsers upon the first connection? I am betting a fair bit of us did. I saw tons of broken links, bad script files, and loads of cross site scripting going on. My average load time of around 1.1 seconds quickly turned into 4-5 on a single page.

 

I am guessing the burden was more on staff than on Unity as a company. The new forums were outsourced so more than likely the burden would be on Lithium to maintain, so maybe less burden on the staff who had to handle issues on the forums. I imagine they just wanted to hand it off to someone else.

According to the mods, the moderating tools on the Lithium system are very difficult to use.

I rather like the personal interaction with the Unity staff members here rather than a very impersonal feel of the new forums.

I hope they find a way to keep these.

 

My laptop isn't a workstation machine, but it's alright, given how old it is.

Here, it loads most of the pages in about a second, maybe a little less.

Over on the old forum, it takes between 3-5 seconds to load anything, depending on where you are clicking from.

Personally, I don't know much about website scripting vs Unity scripting, so I wouldn't know what to look for myself, but I'm betting there are pleanty of others on here who know this stuff better than the Lithium people do. But you don't even need to know how to write code to see that loading difference.

 

If I'm being honest, I think Unity just needs to suck it up and deal with it. Investing in their community should be a priority. Investing in their developers improves the products produced in Unity, which improves the engine's reputation. And companies with great customer service gain more consumer loyality. I'm no business major, but that sounds like a worthwhile investment to me

 

"acting quickly to remedy them."

I wouldn't say a week was quick (they should have got the message to ABORT on day 1), and they still haven't changed the forum subdomain (still forum-old), just little things but still what avoidable mess that week was.

Should not have happened at all really. It only makes me apprehensive about what future hair brained thing they do next, like dumbing down the entire editor interface on the whims of being better for 5year old adult minded retards who want oversized fonts in all caps and spaced out buttons with fat padding, truly taking on the design goals of idiots.

Perhaps the one good thing I could say was that definitely futuristic.. perhaps 60years ahead of its time for when I'm old and senile and need to wear glasses, and maybe want an interface that looks really simple that doesn't just show me information but whats me to make extra page clicks all the time... keeping my brain tasked with meaningless steps because its designed by STUPIDS.

"The Lithium forms made much heavier use of Javascript and had a LOT more going on in the CSS"

Heavier use of javascript for all the wrong effing reasons, like bullshit analytics I'm not sure why morons seem to think throwing in s/hit corp google analytics everywhere, like its somehow good for checking statistics. Apache and other webservers already gather up enough usage based log data directly from the connection page requests without needing to throw extra javascript crap at your careless userbase for more data gathering.

And unlike Xenforo, Lithiums use of javascript for enhanced user experience was pretty effing appalling considering how much infested external js it required just to load up some of its piss poor designed crap, besides good forums/sites should always be workable without needing javascript..that is just lazy assed programmers written all over it.

Also lithium was a complete effing mess with its CSS layout, talk about dumb design and complete bloat.

I wouldn't say Xenforo is the best forum software in the world.. it is definitely one of the cleanest and most functional ajax usage, and its a pretty large community support with addon enhancements none of which Unity seem to use. However its crushed in comparison to some of the forum software in Asia, they obviously haven't been pushed and agenda driven to diversify for idiots I mean dumbify unlike the West.

 

The problem is that instead of the server doing the analytics calls to Google, they are offloading that to the client. They want to save their bits and traffic for fun stuff like making us load 8 pages to get to the place we wanted instead of letting it be Ajax and load inline on the page.

 

That is actually a feature we planned to use once we moved over to Lithium. While we work on the new forum a bit more, and after we get all the feedback everyone supplied collected, collated, and... (some other c word that makes sense here), I'll likely do a series of polls here (or perhaps some simple google forms) so that people can input their preferences, so we can prioritize accordingly.

Thanks @Martin_H, I do appreciate your words. Justifications aside, it is ultimately our responsibility to ensure the best decisions are made for the community, and we took a misstep here. So I can't really congratulate myself for fixing it -- I can only promise that we will do better. I hate to hear that you were losing sleep over this because that's the last thing we want for any of you! And, I'm really thankful to you and others who have stepped in to denounce the more extreme harassers, because that kind of behavior is not wanted around here at all! I'm sure we can all agree on that point

I don't want us to be seen as "sides" at all. I know we have a long way to go to earn this now, but we want to be your allies here. We are on the same "side". I want to focus on building that trust going forward.

To your other points about testing -- yes, we definitely plan to invite many of you in to beta test the new forum or any other new feature for that matter. I've got a little list I'm building based on who has volunteered or spoken out in the feedback thread. I'll be sure your name is on the list.

I don't have a timeline yet but it won't be anything immediate. You best believe we're going to take our sweetass time this time around hah

Analytics did play a part in this decision, among other things which we have failed to communicate properly. I plan to make a basic roadmap available which will also explain a bit about the benefits of moving to Lithium. For example, rebooting the community wiki, integrating a feedback system, and so on. We have a lot to discuss internally, though, so movement on this front may be slow during the summer holiday period in particular.

Back to the Analytics -- it's not to datamine so we can find out what you like, but we needed a way to be able to quantify activity, feedback, behavior, etc. Any quantifiable evidence that we can use to back up why we need the things we need in order to improve the community is a great boon to us on the team, and to the community in an indirect sort of way. It will help us help you.

The Rank system was only meant to be placeholder initially. The thought behind this isn't to gamify the forums to get you to do things; we wanted a way to reward contributions and participation, to reward helpful users. Just as an example, it could even potentially set us up so we could call in all our super users (based on contribution and support, not just post count) for special sneak peeks, or whatever else. Imagine receiving a badge for Unity Certification, which you can display on your profile. Or if you attend Unite, you could get a badge to show you've attended. These are just some ideas -- we'll provide an opportunity for everyone to discuss the Ranks & Badges more at length at a later date.

 

Wait, are they still going to move to Lithium?
If so...

 

https://unity3d.com/jobs/position?id=237297
or apply

 

I hope Lithium enters the 90s and implements an ignore function.

 

How about instead of planning new features for Lithium you make sure you can maintain feature parity with the current software first? I know I'm like a broken record here but Lithium is a huge step backwards in terms of functionality. Should I post the list again? I can post the list again.

 

Sad....I was hoping we would not have to deal with Lithium anymore. I can't imagine it getting better. Having looked at the uses of Lithium on other forums, I see nothing remotely like this forum and lots of complaints about things like no ignore feature, etc.

This is a techy forum. It is for developers. Lithium forums are for chatting about recipes, toys, dating, etc. They like badges and shiny stuff. We like to discuss coding and 3d artwork and developing games.

 

This is just one part of it, but if one of the mod tool pages needs a legend explaining what various red or green colored boxes mean, maybe the whole design should get a major rethink. (I mean...red/green...most common color blindness colors. Fortunately I'm not, but it's certainly an example of nobody having the slightest clue about UI design being involved.)

I think Unity really needs to understand how bad Lithium is and I'm not sure that they do, despite the rollback. Community managers should start getting heavily involved in these forums, using all the features, for at least a couple of weeks. Then go back to the Lithium forums and attempt to do those same things, and try to tell me that it's better in any way, from tech to UI to features.

How about taking a step back, looking at what you want to do, and see what the options really are? And involve the community. You get lots of free consulting! So far I heard "make stuff more connected", which doesn't really explain anything. Be very concrete and specific about what the goals actually are.

So yes, thank you for listening, but don't stop with the rollback! That was a great step and got you a lot of goodwill—don't throw it away.

--Eric

 

DID YOU SAY 3D

Know your customers in every dimension. Be 3D.

 

"We are not code" - spoken like a true DNA denialist!

 

They all know. If I recall correctly @Ony mentioned hearing about it from @Teila through Slack (still need to find the info for that) and I've been in PMs with the other three since before this whole fiasco started (weirdly enough the PM system was never made read only).

 

We have a lot to discuss internally. No new movement will be made in the immediate future, so rest easy for the time being You will have this forum for a while yet.

 

I have nothing against the change (and evolution) but this 'old' forum is best.

 

No! That was the back door used by the RESISTANCE!

Well said.

 

Don't worry, we have your list we has ALL the lists.

 

^ she's not that creepy really. I heard she is dominated by harmless fluffy cats.

 

XenForo is supposed to have a new major version of their forum system in development. They seem to be taking their time to develop it properly though so who knows if it'll be in a ready state any time soon.