Forum upgrade on July 4th

Hello Unity Community,

We’re happy to share with you that on July 4 we will be making an upgrade to our forum. This means the forum will be set to read-only on Monday, July 4 starting at 5.30 am CEST/8.30 pm PST while we switch things over. With any luck, when you come back on Tuesday, July 5, you will be greeted by a shiny new forum.

More than just bringing the design in line with our brand and other pages in the Unity ecosystem, we’re switching to new software which means a few much-needed improvements as well as some new features.

But first, what won’t be changing:

• Your account login and profile remain the same
• We’re migrating over all message content, so you won’t be losing any threads or post counts

It’s important to note that this is only the first step of many as we work together with you to evolve our community sites. We have several more updates planned, such as integrating Answers, rebooting the community Wiki, integrating Issue Tracker, improving Feedback, connecting community accounts to the blog and more. We want to give you the tools needed to get the most out of the community in terms of support, knowledge sharing and discoverability.

We’re excited to get the ball rolling with this first phase of the community platform overhaul. We are trying out some new elements, and things may not look or work as expected, so please bear with us as we iterate and improve on the forum and other community sites. In the coming months, your feedback will be the most valuable source of inspiration and guidance for us. Whether it’s design flows, UI, features or any other input you may have, don’t be shy to share it with us. Together, let’s turn this into a collaborative project where we address areas that are in much needed TLC.

Now, moving on to the new stuff..

Search

We wanted to make it easier for you to find the topics and resources you’re looking for. The new search function will show you related posts as you type out your query, and you can apply filters as well as use modifiers to refine your search. This new search function is also applied while typing out the topic of a new thread, as you’ll be able to see a list of existing or related posts which is useful in case someone has already asked a similar question.

In addition to this, we’re introducing a user-generated tagging system to further help with discoverability. You can add tags to an existing topic and while writing your own, then filter posts by a selected tag.

Structure

You’ll notice the board structure is a bit different now -- some boards have been moved around, renamed or grouped together. We’re introducing a new feature called Labels, which allows you to assign your threads into pre-defined topic categories.

When you navigate into a board that has Labels, you will get the option to filter out which posts to view. As an example, if you are in the “Experimental Features” board, you will see all of the posts discussing our experimental features. If you only want to view results from one of these features, such as the Linux Editor, you click on the “Linux Editor” Label to view them. You can also subscribe to a specific Label if you would like the be notified of any new threads that are added.

Some boards will require you to assign a label to a thread before posting, and this is due to Labels replacing certain forums and sub-forums that we’ve previously had. This is also why, when you create a topic where Labels are available, you will only be able to choose one Label in order for the topic to be categorised correctly.

New components

We’ve added a couple of new components to the forum landing page as well as the individual boards. This is to encourage exploring other areas of the forum (such as related posts) and to recognise our community members who are active contributors to maintaining a healthy community.

Accepted solutions

Someone give an excellent answer to an issue you’ve posted about? Now you can mark their post as the accepted solution for the thread. It’s a nice way to thank your fellow community members for lending a helping hand, and also helps others identify solutions quickly at a glance. We know that there can be multiple solutions to a problem, so when an OP marks a reply as an “Accepted Solution”, it means that this solution worked for their specific query.

Ranks

We temporarily have a placeholder Rank system in place (so don’t grow too attached just yet!). The plan is to replace this at a later date with a fully fleshed out Ranks and Badges system, complete with nice icons and names. The thought behind this is that we want a nice way to encourage knowledge sharing and reward all the different ways people participate and contribute to our community. Since this is a fairly new addition, we want to hear your ideas and thoughts about this. It’s a work in progress, so again, your opinions here would be really awesome.

To discuss the new forum, we have created a dedicated Forum Feedback thread where you can give us your input. We will collect and digest the feedback you give us, so we can get an idea of the areas that need to be addressed As mentioned before, let’s make this a collaborative effort where we improve the tools you use together.


Thank you,

The Community Team

 

sounds great cant wait