Epic Developer Community Site Updates - Docs, SEO, & Search

Bing is now working at least for the basic cpp API stuff, maybe the sitemap was intermittently working on their last scrape. For an example of something working on Bing that is missing on Google search both for:

unreal engine tarray removeat

Since this sitemap stuff is cached with cloudflare, check cloudflare settings for something like what’s going on with this:

While that’s rss, rss uses xml too like the sitemap.

This one for example, with all the cpp pages indexed, still doesn’t load for me and gives a cloudflare timeout:

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/api/documentation/sitemaps/unreal_engine/ue_cpp_api_external/sitemap_1.xml

Could we get at least an option to turn off post previews when browsing categories? Usability of these forums is still a fraction of other discourse based forums. Here’s an example:
BlenderArtists:


Blender DevTalk:

Both of these sites have the main page where you can see both categories as well as recent post on the same page. Epic’s custom discourse redesign has killed this option.
This means user is forced to search for interesting topics in categories. But while on the vanilla discourse, the category pages look like this:

and this:

visiting one on these forum is instant migraine and sensory overload:

It’s just a visual noise wall of text one has to spend tedious effort on to visually extract the thread titles.

Either fix the category topics display or at least give us the good old discord back where we can see categories and recent posts at the same time. Epic’s redesign is probably the worst discourse customization in terms of UX I’ve ever seen.

Currently comments/replies are so big, it’s honestly kind of annoying. If I just want to put a small comment for a teaser for a game update, for example, it makes a huge comment block anyway.
This makes it a hassle to look for specific comments, or heck, even reaching the end of the page.

Comments should be made MUCH more compact than they are currently.

I also have more suggestions in addition to more compactness, and the “quote” feature actually gives a pretty good concept of what I’m thinking should be done to the comments.

This is how comments should look. Not only this but some other changes would be nice too:

  1. Account info (posts, answers, bio, etc.) should appear when you hover your mouse over the name of the account on a comment. This will make other comments more visible, while at the same time giving access to account details.
  2. Allow deletion of comments without showing that the comment was deleted. This just leaves empty clutter around the site that has no benefit. How is knowing a comment was deleted going to help anything?
    If this isn’t something that is planned to be removed, then at least make it 10x smaller or harder to see
  3. Add a 3-dot menu that allows us to like, copy link, flag, bookmark, or reply to a comment, without the clutter of everything there at the same time.

These are my thoughts on the matter. Thank you for reading.

Note - I am unsure if this is the wrong place to post this, but this is the best place I could find to even suggest a change for the site because there is nowhere else visible