Dear Unity Answers moderators, share your thoughts

Hello all.
I realised that there are a lot of questions in the queue over at Unity Answers recently. They remain unattended to for a few days.



I understand not having the motivation to Reject or Publish pending questions/answers when you know that someone else is going to do it.

In my opinion, there should be some kind of reward for moderators which are actually taking their time to contribute. That way, there would be less users waiting. I remember my first question, which got accepted within an hour. If I'd have waited 4 days, I would have found an alternative to Unity.

Anyone agree? Disagree? Please share yout thoughts.

 

Make the moderators into garbage workers. If they don't reject something in time, it gets published. Add a blame list that shows moderators who logged during the period between posting and publishing, because they were clearly around and did nothing. Shame as the ultimate motivator!

 

For the sake of quality of the site you probably want to go the other way. Any questions that don't get published are auto rejected. Many of the questions coming into answers are junk anyway, so loosing the questions is no big issue.

Shaming volunteer moderators is a good recipie for the mods to leave the site forever.

 

From a purely technical standpoint, yes, you are correct. Problem is, you can replace the word "questions" in that sentence with "customers" and you essentially have what many perceive the UT mentality to be.

It might up the quality of the site, but it really sucks for those guys trying (in the correct way no less) to get answers to their questions. We all have to start somewhere, and most of those junk questions are likely from young people who just don't understand the concepts well enough to figure out how to do what they want. People who ask stupid questions aren't necessarily stupid people (not what you're saying there at all).

To the OT - I'm more a fan of positive reinforcement. But aside from currency, what could you possibly offer the moderators in return?

 

Did you take my post seriously?

 

There was talk of using karma at one point. Most of the mods weren't particuarly fussed with the idea. Once you hit 10k more karma is frivolous.

It's an interesting point. How many people asking for community help finding a missing semi colon are actually paying users? I have no clue.

Fact is there are a ton of poor quality questions. Poor formatting. Duplicates. Insufficient information. RTFM. Google ect. Loosing most of the churn wouldn't hurt the site one bit.

A quick Google search on most questions brings up a bunch of unanswered stuff on answers. I delete them as I go, but not having the questions in the first place would be better.

As always anyone that disagrees is free to go join the mod queue themselves and clear out the questions.

It's too early for me.

 

That's a fair point.

I suppose I'm of the camp that if you paid the $1,500 for Unity pro, you might be allowed a few mishaps in the syntax of your question. If not just for the possibility that it's early for them as well

 

I don't disagree here. However there is currently no mechanism for mods to identify pro users.

 

And hard to check if there's a bad mod that discards pro users' questions. It's blade with two edges.

 

To be clear Unity forum moderators != Unity answers moderators. I don't have anything to do with that site, but I understand its volunteer based... maybe you could volunteer?

 

Does that help me when I want my answers accepted?

 

I'd be lying if I said it didn't, but then most volunteers probably know the answer or consider themselves knowledgeable. If not, then one must wonder why.

 

As a mod you can accept your own answers. Normally I only do it if the person hasn't been seen on the site since they asked the question.

 

This is the real issue. Most of the questions sitting in the queue are borderline trash and nobody wants to deal with them.

 

If you're asking the question of the people you paid, sure. On the answers site you're asking a group of volunteers and/or community members, though. They don't (directly) get anything from your $1500.

This is the crux of the issue, right. What do the volunteers get for their effort?

They're doing a largely boring job because... why? Clearly some people do have reasons. But there clearly isn't enough motivation there to get the job done in the quantities required. Is there anything that could change that?

There's two approaches - reduce the workload or increase the number of people doing the work. Ideally, do both. But, how could either be achieved?

My first thought is whether or not Answers has a built in, automated search that users have to go past to be able to post their question. I've used help desk systems before where you type a question, it does a search for you, and only at the bottom of the page with the results is there a button saying "I still need to ask my question". Does Answers have something like that? (It'd be nice if the forums had something like that for thread titles, I think.)

My thoughts are that if the number of "junk" questions are reduced then both the workload is reduced and the work that remains is more interesting, possibly motivating more people to take a look at it.

 

Honestly, at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if bug fixing suddenly became a "community volunteer" job as well. Makes perfect sense for free users. But now it kind of feels like I've donated the several thousand dollars I've collectively spent on this program.

 

The Answers site is only one avenue for support, and I've always got answers if I've sent a question to Unity's support department.

 

Wait, I thought the forums were the support department. That's what I gathered from the dozens of posts relating to 5.x releases.

"Sorry, we can't answer all your questions. The best place to go is the forums and get help from users there."

That's been my experience.

 

I can only assume it depends on the question. I'm sure they'd get a bigger flood than the Answers queue does. If they devoted time to properly answering every email they get I don't think they'd have time to do anything else.

I guess the question is, do you think they'd be better off without the Answers site? Even if it's not running optimally I think it's better to have than not to have, regardless of the level of support provided directly by Unity.

 

Do I think it's worth it? Absolutely. I never meant to suggest otherwise. I would like to see a stronger step forward from Unity to help customers with issues related to the engine. They're creative enough to do it, I have no doubt about that.

 

Oh, I didn't mean to imply anything either. It was a genuine question. I agree it's good to have, but sometimes asking the question prompts other useful thoughts.

 

I thought everyone posted their questions in these forums, like the scripting one, the editor one etc. Why have both?

Maybe the Answers could be converted to something akin to an FAQ, where the questions that are commonly asked in the forums get summarised/written up & posted across to Answers so that users can find one Unity Answer to their google search?

 

In general, we'd want to encourage new Answers users to use the Help Room space rather than post to the default space to minimise the amount of posts in the mod queue, but I think one of the problems lies in new Answers users don't know about it and don't read the site navigation guide before starting to post.

There is an auto-complete/drop-down menu with suggestions on similar questions when you are writing in the title/question that shows how many replies each post has:

 

You are right. I also have a question which is waiting for moderation and i didn't notice that i can immediately post to Help Room. So can i ask the question again in Help Room or should i wait for approval??

 

Since it's been necreoed, I think we should continue this discussion. This problem hasn't been solved; the queue is often hitting 200+ posts, and I've never logged in to see it below 50.

Some comments:
1) The post quality is so awful. You have to make a comment and/or reject so many posts. This is tedious beyond reason. We need drop down rejection reasons, with an option for optional comments years ago.
2) Now, obviously as a volunteer we are doing it out of choice, but clearly not enough people are choosing to help with these huge queues. Why? Clearing out the mod queue as a volunteer is an absolutely thankless job. No support, nothing. Hell, nobody even knows that you ever did a thing. There needs to be some recognition for doing this roles. Karma, public recognition, badges, whatever. There needs to be something to attract more people to it if this issue will ever be fixed. People volunteer to help people, and it certainly doesn't feel like you're helping when you finish clearing the mod queue. More like you just put a dying horse out of it's misery.
3) The website is so clunky and just flat awful.

a) Find someone, please, that can fix the search. It's just flat awful. Searching the exact title of a post sometimes does not even list the post that I know is there.
b) Why am I searching post titles? Because when you click the link to view the content under review, it only shows the exact content under review. This is beyond stupid. For example: an obvious comment posted as an answer. Now since I can only see their wrongfully-placed answer, whose answer should I move it under? Who knows, I can't see any of them. Now I have to find the complete version of the post through the awful search.
c) It is very hard to navigate around Unity Answers. If I myself get lost, I can't blame the new guy for not finding the Help Room. "Spaces" is such an odd and hidden design.
d) The "Known Issues(and fixes coming soon)" has been around for a long while and none of it has been getting fixed. Half of it is very basic functionality. Images by URL, Titles being parsed by Satan, Back to Mod Queue buttons missing, etc. are all problems that should've never shipped.​

The mod queue is a real problem and needs to be addressed. Unity Answers as a whole is very questionable and at this point, we should evaluate the future of it as a whole. Is it so critically broken that it should be archived and locked? Honestly, if the incompetency and faltering community support continues, I believe that answer is yes. Maybe even now, it simply acts as the garbage shoot for the all the crap that we don't want on the Forums.

 

Thanks for the additional feedback. We have had issues "fixed" since October that have unfortunately not been able to be pushed due to some run-ins with core issues that are preventing us from getting on to the next versions (we are several versions behind already.) I know this is a huge pain, and in the next couple of months we will be releasing a completely new redesign of the entire community platform (which includes Unity Answers) that we have been working on lately. All of the issues (both bugs and usability) we have been facing with Unity Answers (before and now) are documented for the next system we are moving to, as to make sure they do not exist there. So sorry for all the trouble this site has been causing everyone, we are a small team of 2 handling issues from the community for the engine, so maintaining the current sites do unfortunately get second priority during critical times

 

As someone who doesn't use answers intentionally, I honestly find it annoying when I try to google something and it comes up with an "answers" page.

#1 - often the google link doesn't actually connect to the question and just directs to a listing of questions that have no relevance.
#2 - the questions themselves and the answers are often so narrow as to not be useful.

Not to be grumpy, but for me answers is a kind of annoying obstacle to finding information. The format itself sort of demands that questions are very specific, and that answers are tailored to the question. This means that often "Answers" is not a resource for frequently asked questions, but a bizarre set of one offs that generally have really crappy tailored solutions (that are often wrong or.. bad - but are often cut and paste friendly).

I think that moving away from a stack overflow clone and moving towards something more directly interactive - like IRC for these kinds of questions is a better solution for everyone.

 

How do you even become a moderator? I like to help people and it's something I might do when I'm bored of something else but I'd definatley not jump through hoops to become one.

 

Gain enough Karma on Answers and you're set.

I used to be pretty active on Answers, then the update dropped, everything went bonkers and all my posts go to the mod-q. Never could get it fixed so I quit using it.

 

You only need 1k karma. 2k unlocks a bit more features for you.