What is this?

What is this advertising pop-up message? Is this some kind of virus or something new to the forums? Can we get rid of those?

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We've been using some floating notices on specific forums to help drive some of our new solution pages. You can click the X in the chat window and it will go away forever just like our other notices.

 

Can the previously closed notifications be toggled off to get refreshed as to what's available and currently trying to be pushed. Some may be useful, just not at the time, and I'm not sure I'd know where to look if/when I'd like this info

 

Could we have a choice as to these floating notices show or not? Like "Do you want to see our new floating notices popping up" Yes/No?

 

So one person is asking for engineers to work on forum software in order to develop a system that supports blocking these notifications per user, and the other person would like to see all the notifications so far in chronological order.

As these things are currently seriously low pain for either user, and (perhaps) cost more money than a few unity pro licenses to implement, I imagine it can't be the highest priority. I agree though, nice to have options, but low user pain.

 

It's a point of view like another; "one low user pain" multiplied by xxx websites = one not so low user pain, though.

 

It's low user pain because currently only two users want something done, and doing something about it is usually one click per week (or perhaps month). It is called logic.

 

Sure. And since nobody complains, these pop up will generalise in the future.

I guess I'll have to avoid the Unity ads forums in the future and all the others afterwards.

Forget I've asked; I don't see what I expected. You can close this thread.

 

We don't close normal threads with replies and I'm sure Unity really appreciates the feedback, I'm just wondering if it's worth such a strong reaction from you to avoid forums because you felt it was a huge problem to click something. But each to their own.

 

Notifications are ties to your account. Once you've closed a notification there isn't a way to get it back aside from maybe visiting the forum when not logged in.

Thanks for the feedback! We can look into this as a potential option.

If you don't mind me asking, do you currently find yourself reading and dismissing some of the notices that we run at the top of the forum? We are trying to make sure that anything that is news-worthy to our community gets to them and we're exploring new options with the floating notices.

 

Maybe install Greasemonkey and knock up your own script to remove them from the page, haven't looked at the elements but I'm guessing it wouldn't be too difficult to script, I mean if it comes down to not having them versus quitting the forums for the OP

 

One attention grabbing way is for staff - perhaps you, @Buhlaine could do a weekly podcast/youtube/whatever roundup of what is happening at unity HQ and a summary of events. This is the sort of thing people just sub to and then get updated on, just a thought.

Here, the presenter would mention where to find out about monetising apps one week or a competition the next week, patch releases, general pop-up and banner replacements with a human being in video form.

Epic do something similar - don't avoid what the competition does if it's a decent idea. Also, I'm aware Unity tried similar before, but I do believe the format was thought out badly. Or not thought out, period.

I guess what's needed is an alternative to popups. While I disagree they cause problems, they don't exactly help either.

 

"floating notices" are simply popups. Users have been trained really, really hard to think that every floating window in a web page contains a virus or a scam, so they're incredibly uncomfortable to get. Don't make popups.

I didn't realize they were possible to close until I read your post. I was wondering why you kept the same notices around for so long. I'll probably start noticing them again now since new ones you make will cause the layout of the forum to change.

Perhaps turn the almost-invisible x symbol into text that says "dismiss", or something a little more noticeable.

 

Popups should die. Nobody trusts them and frankly, they are more than obnoxious wherever websites are concerned. Banners are still cool though, and eventually the banner is read.