The forums have been rolled back -- now what?

Hi all -

If you want to request hyphen removal from your username, please head here.

Thanks~

 

Thank you for always listening, even when sometimes we are pretty loud---and for helping us.

 

inb4 someone asks what concatenate means

 

I'm sure enough of us have had to do it with strings that it won't come up

 

Does anyone else have trouble STAYING logged into the forums? Everytime I close the browser and re-enter I have to re-login even though the info is already filled out...

 

See this post on page 3
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/th...lled-back-now-what.415360/page-3#post-2735322

Not fixed quite yet though.

 

We have a fix for this awaiting final review before going live soon. Should stop the logging out issues

 

Note that this seems to affect Unity itself as well, not just the forums. It constantly logs out and asks for account info on every machine.

 

So when you fix the login issues? Im tired of logging in then every time come back to forum have to click on login buttin log me in again!!!

 

This didn't happen to me today and hasn't happened for awhile--asking for login info when I was opening a Unity project.

As far as the forum is concerned, I was logged in and closed my browser. When I opened my browser I was still logged in or am I missing something? I think aliceingameland is trying very hard to help us and has done a lot within her power so I have a lot more patience. And as far as logging in anywhere is concerned, I don't seem to have a problem. Or am I just blessed.
: )

 

Which browser you using, I use firefox latest!

 

status?
having to login everytime I visit the forums is getting old.

 

I use Chrome.

 

Has this gone live yet? I still get locked out every time I close the browser.

 

Just repeating this once more..
you could block most of the foreign character topic title spam by simply checking it title contains those characters..

example with js,
https://jsfiddle.net/unitycoder/q160u9jn/

 

So, I just got followed by a spambot. I'm...flattered? (Still nuked it though.)

--Eric

 

..please not this again?

 

I've mentioned in a few threads over the past months that there are areas we want to improve on the forums. I'm well aware of the last time a major upgrade took place on the forums and we'd not want to fall into that scenario again.

Of course if major things are planned, we will consult you all.

 

I don't see the reason for any big changes though.

Instead of "magic reasons" you should tell the regulars here EXACTLY why you're changing their beloved habitat. There is a large disconnect from staff who look at forums as data, and those who've made it a mental home of sorts to discuss, to be here for many years, to make friends etc.

Because my support isn't here until you do that. Absolutely totally your call to tell us or not but I will first and foremost be on the community's side.

 

Iirc last time the new changes were previewed (shortly before the lithium incident) to a couple of long-term users/moderators like @hippocoder @zombiegorilla and others, they didn't like the changes and your company straight up ignored them. Please don't do that again!

There is very little you could visibly change to this forum that wouldn't make us revolt, and if it isn't a visible change, why change at all?

I also would recommend slow and gradual change over a multi month/year period. Switching away from xenforo to something else (like but not limited to lithum) is out of the question anyway, because it would be too jarring and personally I think all other forums are garbage. A slow transition - feature by feature - over a long time frame allows to properly test, iterate and if necessary roll back in small increments, with every change getting equal amounts of focus and nothing being overshadowed by other problems.

But really, unless you can come up with very good reasons for any changes that convince the community to a high percentage when presenting forum-update-proposals ahead of time, you shouldn't be changing anything about the forum.

 

Here is a GIF I took the last time the forum was updated. The pop-up window for embedding would just slowly shrink until it disappeared entirely.



Let it stand as a lesson to future generations of the perils of hubris.

On a more serious note, please remember that one of this forum's primary uses is as an archive of Unity problems/solutions. I teach a course on Unity, and one of the things I show my students is how to correctly find solutions when they encounter an unknown problem, and the forum is key to that.

 

Since this is back in play, I am going to re-post my 2016 missive, as it is still completely relevant today.

Quoting myself,

"This forum is a web-hosted app. Unity has on their servers reams of user data from the past decade as to how people actually use this forum every day.

That data enables Unity QA to instantly tell if the new forum works.

Before Unity even contemplates changing anything, make sure the top dozen or so use and UI flow cases and patterns are supported precisely the same way in the new forum. This rollout basically broke every single use pattern I used, and there was no clear replacement how to do anything that I used to do."

Finally I will add a summary of many of the other posts here: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

 

THIS! For better or worse, a huge amount of collective tribal knowledge related to operating Unity is found right here in these forums. Some is awesome, some not quite awesome, but almost all of it gives the Unity3D knowledge seeker more information about how to refine and/or complete their search.

 

The search function is actually one of the few areas that I can think of, that could see legit improvements. E.g. when I search for "fov" - which is a very specific term and not at all super generic and unlikely to be less common than the non abbrevieated "field of view" in thread titles - I get this:




If you want to fix something, fix this first please.

 

I am going to respectfully disagree. It would be nice if Unity could devote the type of time that google does to semantic and/or smart searching, but they can't. Even Microsoft couldn't do it with Bing.

Let Unity focus on making Unity even greater than it already is, and instead just search on Google. If you want to force it to be forums, use site:forum.unity.com in your search. It works AWESOMELY.

 

Fair point, but I don't want them to make huge changes to their algorithm, I just want them to switch off the line of code that prevents searching for 3-letter words. Google is good if you are trying to find an answer to a specific problem, but it's bad at limiting the search to "thread titles" (if there is another way to do that with google like limit search to page title in addition to url, please tell me), which often is very useful to me. Often I'm trying to find specific old threads that I only half remember the title off.

 

Thing is, I'm pretty sure a lot of people in web optimisation business will want to change this forum. But they come at it from the wrong perspective.

They tried that with Unity connect. People who use Unity don't think like their data implies among social media. You won't increase people using the forums with changes because the dust has settled and there's discord. If you want to compare this forum to another (hypothetical forum) then make sure the other forum also doesn't have discord and so on cos if Unity connect is part of this in any shape or form, I think it's going to end super badly.

If inspired by another forum or pressure from a hired gun, then please do the right thing and have a second look. The gulf between those who use the forums and those who don't is just too big in this unique case.

 

100% of the web redesigns I've seen in the last several years or so have been objectively worse. I'm not opposed to changing things—the last forum software change was definitely an improvement overall—but web designers have collectively taken leave of their senses in recent years. I'm gonna blame mobile.

--Eric

 

Why? There's plenty about this forum which could be improved, which is how this conversation came up in the first place. (In another thread someone was asking about more granular notification options, which is definitely a legitimate shortcoming of the current solution.)

As has already been mentioned, the forums are first and foremost a place for community interactions. I don't care what the software is or how it works as long as it supports a reasonably similar set of interactions as the current stuff. To be clear, I'm not saying "it must function the same", I'm saying that I want it to to let me perform equivalent activities.

 

I'm talking about layout changes and such. Unity have a terrible track record on those. Changes to available notification settings aren't what I'd classify "visible", because I wouldn't even notice unless you told me or the defaults changed from what I have now. I'd be totally fine with such "quality of life" features. I just don't want them to get overzealous and fvck up the complete forum again like they did with Lithium. Or the new appstore design that I still think is worse than the old one (the one before the last one if I counted right).

 

Last time there were forum changes, I was unable to read the forums. It was painful for me to respond. Accessibility was ignored and those of us with vision issues and or repetitive motion issues were ignored.

Those of us with old eyes can use these forums. Please do not go backward. I do not think I will forgive next time....