Official Update about the future of Unity Answers

Hi everyone,

After receiving your feedback last year, when we announced our initial plans to shut down Unity Answers, we returned to the drawing board. We have spent the time since then working on a better solution that we’d like to share with you. In summary, we will migrate Unity Answers content to a new Community platform and are aiming to launch a public beta later in May. Before the beta starts, we will set Unity Answers to read-only mode in order to prepare for the migration so that the existing content is available on the new platform from the first day of public testing. We will set up redirects for all migrated questions and answers to ensure old links won’t break when Unity Answers has been taken offline. Unity Answers will reach the end of its life at the end of May.

The new platform will be called Unity Discussions and is powered by Discourse. We have chosen to work with Discourse because it supports threaded comments, highlighting of accepted answers, and other key capabilities that match our vision. It is also a very flexible and customizable technology, so we can continue to ensure we meet the needs of our evolving community.

Please read on for more information.

Reasons for the migration and long-term vision
Last year we stated:

What was true last year is still true today. Our community sites have sprawled, and we genuinely want to offer you a way to easily find answers and enjoy sharing your insights with the Unity Community.

The Forums and Answers systems that have been around for many years are not scaling well, and we have spent this year re-imagining and working on a better solution. Part of what you have helped us see is the redundancy between these sites, but also how they are serving you differently. We aim to consolidate our platform technologies while expanding what you can do within the official Unity Community ecosystem.

We will do this in stride with your continuous feedback. We are starting a closed beta of the new platform today with a number of members from the Unity community. Once we have completed the data migration, we will launch Unity Discussions in public beta for Q&A discussions as we sunset Answers by the end of May.

The Unity Forums will remain as they are for the time being, with the intent to also migrate them to Unity Discussions, starting later this year once the site has matured.


Next steps
For the upcoming open beta, we are focusing on providing a replacement solution for Unity Answers that meets the following needs:

• Preserve existing knowledge and keep old links accessible via redirects
  
  
• Preserve existing user accounts and their connection to questions and answers
  
  
• Provide community members with the ability to ask questions, discuss answers, and mark accepted answers as solutions
  
  
• Provide an updated tagging structure to make it easier to categorize and navigate conversations
  
  
• Update guidelines and provide onboarding information and templates for the new platform

The following things will be happening, so that Unity Answers is sunset by the end of May.

1. Unity Answers becomes read-only
   
   
2. Unity Answers Data is migrated to Unity Discussions
   
   
3. Unity Discussions launches in open beta
   
   
4. Redirects for old Answers links are set up after verifying the success of the migration
   
   
5. Unity Answers is taken offline
   
   
6. Unity Discussions leaves beta and fully launches

Call for feedback and future updates
Please let us know your thoughts about these changes in the comments below. We will share more detailed information about the new platform and updates on the migration in a couple of weeks once we are ready to begin the open beta.

 

I believe what you're asking is already available in Discourse by default.

 

Thank you @jiraphatK for the clarification, and for the real life example. I will look into this.

 

Some of us were
I tested both and this one is far superior to Lithium

 

Dark mode is there

 

Thanks for the feedback, the aim is to build something better for the whole community.We want to find ways to encourage us to engage with user and vice versa, something that we have heard called out by our community. We will be iterating on the site as much as needed and we will keep making improvements, The plan is to have a public roadmap where you can all see what we are planning for the community and see what we are doing.

 

We have not launched the replacement yet. We are at closed Beta so that will be modified when we make the final launch

 

Hi everyone,

We want to give you all a quick update on what's happening around Answers.

The good news is that our initial migration of data worked! However we still have more work to do to validate that everything is in place – including ensuring that post formatting is preserved, thread structure is properly transitioned, and that all pages of answers are properly migrated.

Our current goal is to have this completed by early June, before our existing contract terminates, to then launch the public beta. It is possible that this first public iteration might still have some rough edges but we will keep improving things as we continue on this journey with you.

Please note that we are aiming to set Unity Answers to read-only mode on the 31st of May to do a final data pull before the migration.

Thanks for your continued patience throughout this project. We are excited to bring you Discussions (the new Answers) and to give you all a place to talk about Unity in the public sphere – to ask questions and feel listened to.

 

Yes, that will be possible.

 

The site is not set up yet. As I mentioned we are migrating data across. It has none of the features turned on as yet. All posts there will be removed as the site is reset often during the migration. Apologies for the emails, ( it was a errant default setting ) but hey these things happen when your setting things up...

 

Hi Steen,

We'll reach out to current active moderators with more information early next week. Discourse does not have a combined reputation score like Answers did but instead uses trust levels ranging from 0 to 4 that determine users' access to moderator abilities. Transitioning between user levels is automated and determined by stats such as questions answered, likes received, activity levels, etc, and the highest level will require manual input from site admins.