Epic looking for your feedback on the direction to take with Answerhub

How is my reply spam? Defending someone’s post? Good lord no wonder nothing gets fixed here
Everynone I know you’re one of like two or three people who help folks on this forum, I see you neck and neck with the other guy, but my previous Point was that regardless of quality of posting, regardless of spelling or spacing, there are so many questions that just never get answered. I’ve never, not once, had a reasonable answer to well crafted questions on this forum in over a year, and that’s the real problem. There aren’t enough folks at epic answering the easy go answer questions probably because there aren’t enough resources being thrown at it. We need 30-40 everynones pulling weight to get this forum reasonable.

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I did get an answer about three times during last three years.
Sadly though, each time it was just a bug confirmation.
First one is supposed to get fixed in 4.27.1.
We’ll se if it’ll actually get fixed or as usual.
Yup, this is laughable.

In all honesty though, I’d much rather prefer no answers to something like
if (true == true) { bool TRUE = true; return TRUE }
Which is, without exaggeration, is the quality of answers I am seeing way too often and also what I see in almost every unofficial tutorial, blueprint or not.

wow i was not expectating things go on this way, srry any trouble and really bad english, it’s really not my primary language and i’m really trying to learn aways open for feedback and improviments.

going back to main topic as others pointed this is the big issue, for what i’m getting at this point, the forums or asnwerhub are almost dead as “source of help and support”, as peoples noted if you are trying to “start” on unreal and looking for help and support, answerhube is really the worst place aside some really rare moments you will gonna loose time wating for help on that, i’m really totally support the shut-up since it not working anymore and is almost dead as it looks.

Now forum is on a almost the same situation, while sometimes i do get some replay and answers here and there still feel not "supportive as it was supposed since if no “good soul” outside unreal staff don’t help or share any “secret tip” you are screwed, waiting for a unreal staff to pop up to help is the same as let’s say jesus criste come back “again”.

if you don’t get help from experienced users then no answer, which leads us to the “reddit”, which seens still the “place to get some answers” and tutorials, even if also not that much as you wanted, still better than both forum and answerhube which while one is a walking dead the other is on a terminal condition just waiting to be dead( when comes to support not to talk).

While for “talk” and share some moments or talk about new techs and news from epic, the forum still a lot alive and strong when comes to “support and help new comers peoples in need” from epic team or even experienced peoples it’s become almost a pray to god someone goes to help you.

i do agree which in the past it used to be a little better as i told in my previous post i remember back in the past getting more help than now and it make hard for “new comers” and indies to try unreal since it’s not so "newcomers friendly as it was supposed to be, most of the times is "go to youtube for tutorials or watch epic team lives, where they talk about “everything” aside what you are actually wanting, then or you "learn by yourself in the hardest way or pay someone to teach to you or pay someone to “make for you”, which again for "low budget or “one man team” is really hard to start.

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This isn’t the right topic for it,
But generally speaking…

Keep your sentences short.
The shorter the better.
Less chance for confusion.

You can also include a version in your original language.

Re: getting help, which is also NOT the point of the topic.

If a request is a rambling of 20 run on sentences that can be barely read, and most definitely not understood - no one will touch it.

The subjects are often very technical and complex.
Writing topics like “x doesn’t work” means you’ll probably get a response of “wtf are you talking about”? Or “sure it does”.

If instead you include details about what doesn’t work and how to replicate it, when people read it, they would actually be more inclined to help, as they would have at least some information to make assumptions with.

RE: the rest.

If your “feedback” to epic is that you can’t find answers when you ask something.

Sure. No one can. That’s the point.

Ask @BrUnO_XaVIeR for instance.
Did anyone tell you why the community ocean project water needed transparency sort priority per pixel to avoid artifacts?

The more specific a problem is, the less of a chance you’ll get an answer without actually going around trying to find an answer yourself…

IF we had a community wiki instead, huge important things like that, or like the character movement component, or think even new nuisances like Tessellation alternatives, best/good practices?
maybe you would be able to just find answers without having to really search…

BUT NO… epic took our wiki away instead.

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What did I do this time…
I swear to God I am innocent!

I refer to the secondary space as Unanswered Hub. My success rate with it hasn’t been the best.

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Thanks for all the continued input and feedback! I read through all of it, and continue to agree. Some things are not straight forward to resolve though.

@JoSf - Thanks for the great reply, it captured a lot of thoughts of the whole learning process I thought, and I linked it on to the learning team.

Here is where we are at:

  1. Overall Community and Learning Overhaul
    We are now in week 5 of actual web development on this, but it are still early days. We just got the first basic live webpage standing now, with a CMS and a basic tutorial system.
    We need at least a month more before being able to communicate something more concrete, possibly more. We will get back to this via a separate thread when the time is right.
    But yes - it centralizes things including most learning, it is to offer a community wiki, it is to offer snippets and code/BP/material copy pastes, coupled to the forums, AH, and KB (see below) and with a single profile system, including better support for recognition and personality (avatars, badges, stats) and a better way of supporting and helping key community members. That is the plan in any case. But hey, its development so lets see what our dev velocity is, doing all of that.

Additionally

  • We added Unreal Slackers to UE com main menu by the way.
  • We are also bringing in moderation help, which will help us to react faster and better, or help sort content better here on the forums and do a bit of reorg.
  • There is also a drive to create an Epic staff forum section, for Epic people to post stuff they work on, in order to stimulate people internally to join in here. We need see how that goes, but that is the idea at least. That should be live within the month.
  • Furthermore we are looking at a forum category reorg in order to prepare for what is to come.
  • We are starting weekly sessions with a select group of key community members to provide early visibility into our plans and get their feedback and input. We intend to slowly grow this group as the weeks and months will go by. The first call will be tonight.
  1. Answerhub itself
    We now have all data migrated (from a given export date at least) to Discourse, and we have a modified Discourse running on a private instance that does following:
  • AH and Forum threads mixed together, but possible to display only discussions or only questions via a large set of buttons at the top + related AH functionality
  • We have a KB feature, Knowledge Base, which is going to bring over the hundreds of KB articles from UDN, to the public AH + then be extended upon further by allowing anyone to write a KB article, or promote existing threads or questions to KB articles (requires an Epic moderator at the moment to actually promote it - but anyone could write it). These KB posts, will live within the forum, but can also be displayed through a new interface that will be embedded into the forums in order to turn it into more of a proper FAQ type thing.
  • I have asked that we can please look at making further changes to the forums, such as avatars, and as much other stuff such as signatures. Some of it is not fully possible in Discourse. We are discussing it, but we are trying. And preferably simships when the AH integration comes live.

Here is what we have left:

  • Various UI and usability issues related to the above changes. Styling discussions. How to make a question appear different from a discussion and such
  • Attachments from AH are still missing and will be particularly challenging, due to needing these exported by the AH host
  • Karma points and user data migration needs work still
  • We still need to do the roll out strategy. It will involve most likely a week+ long effort where we will put some sections in read only as we migrate those, while the rest stays live. A full migration would cost 72 hours straight, so we want to break this into pieces. We will also still need to do a full AH export again.

ETA towards the end of the month, probably. Details to follow.

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Ue dot com uses invalid https certificate from another domain.
Just fire your web dev team / contractor / partner / whathaveyou, they are only doing you harm.
Next thing you know is a billion euro court order for a major security gdpr-breach.
It’s better to not touch the internet at all than to do it like this.

I think he just shortened unrealengine.com; as far as I can see, ue.com is not actually theirs.

He shouldn’t’ve done this

Hey man. Are you just trolling us or what?

Literally 99% of the feedback was “do not use fu*king discourse” and you get back to us with “we added new features to discourse”.

Really?
Why ask for feedback at all? Do whatever. Without asking.
If the feedback is to be completely ignored what’s the point of asking?

How about contacting real companies to do the work?

Or even better, putting together a team of contractors from the forums instead?

You know, Someone capable of creating something that will actually work instead of letting the same team that’s completely screwed up website, forums, and answer hub over and over instead?

Whatever the internal team is does not deserve any other chance;
How many times has answer hub been unavailable because of something like an expiring license in the past year?
How many topics were lost in the forum move? Images are still missing all over the place.

Your reply feels more like a total troll - like many of the other promises that were never kept.

I know you are only doing what you are told. It’s still ridiculous.

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As far as delineating between a question and a discussion visually, how about something like a watermark inside the text space of the original post? It could be a bit more visually interesting than a plain question mark or other symbol for discussion, such as a bevel in it or a slightly 3D outline to it. A symbol to use for discussions could be the exclamation point or asterisk. Additionally, it could be color-coded in terms of the overlaid posting space (e.g., currently it’s a lighter dark grey background overlaid on a nearly black dark grey background).

One of the main problems I see with merging Q&A / AnswerHub into the forums is the sheer volume of posts to contend with for users, especially beginners and users who are new to the forums or rarely / occasionally access them.

Another issue that is potentially avoidable is a rating / voting function which causes certain answers and solutions that are voted higher to supercede other ones and causes a rift in which people for whom those ‘best’ answers don’t work are going to be digging deeper and deeper into the forums to discover the ancient artifacts that resolve their modern dilemma. IMO, and as a suggestion from considering the causality, it would be better to divvy up the workload of accessing information / answers in a Q&A section by making it an option to enable or disable the influence of the voting system. This is already an issue in the forums wherein a question is asked or a problem posted to ask for help, and the OP is having to decide among a number of answers and potential solutions. The decisive factor is not always, nor should it be leveraged in a forum or a deep Q&A as, the popularity level of the answer / solution / reply. The idea stated above to improve forum efficiency and avoid redundancies more by creating an FAQ and common problems / mistakes and their solutions is workable for the whole knowledge base, and there probably needs to be direct links to those pages or that subsection of the site somewhere in forums that is easily accessible for new users. And not relegated to the top of the hub of the forums, but perhaps at the bottom with the suggested / latest posts area too. I’d say put it in a sidenav, but there’s nothing of the sort currently in the forums and I don’t know if Discourse would support that feature. It might also be unwelcome or an annoyance to numerous users to see it on the side, and have to scroll to it to click such a link during the searching of a long series of topic replies. So, another idea for linking to other learning / FAQ pages, contextually based on the topic / question, is another icon or text link inside each posting or reply (e.g., next to the heart, share-a-link, flag, etc).

Voted for merge.
For me, the only payload that answerhub carried, was that topics were tight, covering one particular issue. If that remains being so on whatever else platform it might be on, It would be equivalent to answerhub. But Unreal’'s auditory grew considerably since 2014 and now the same system needs some noise filtering, both self-contained and manual moderation. As I see it, for the system to work nicely, everyone who lands on thread regarding particular issue, is to be encouraged to upvote and downvote replies, not only topic starter. This way the system will have pretty long life, low maintenance efforts and good usability.

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Good theory, bad application.

When you do this you are at the mercy of the masses, and the masses seem to still think the earth is flat, vaccines cause autism, and other such nonsense.

It’s really not any different from having the topic starter choose.

How about the Epic Team actively participates and selects the “proper” answer instead?
Since we have to assume they are the “higher authority” on what works and doesn’t work…

The “best” alternative is to collect and keep both.
Think of it like movie ratings between metacritics and popular vote on RottenTomatos.

You can have an authoritative answer, and then whatever the masses like to do.

Note that in some cases (mentioned above) knowing the difference between the 2 could potentially cause depression :stuck_out_tongue:

“The masses” don’t think the earth is flat and “the masses” don’t think vaccines cause autism. Giving everyone the chance to vote on answers is exactly how all the Stack Overflow sites work and the signal-to-noise ratio on those seems to indicate very strongly that this is not a problem we’re likely to face.

We’re not talking about teenagers review-bombing Steam here.

The UE community also had more than two weeks to vote on this thread and a whooping 50 people decided to do so. Not getting enough engagement is right now far more likely than being flooded with idiots distorting answer scores.

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Yeah, the problem is that Epic in general doesn’t want to invest into learning, so to speak. Answer hub/wiki/forums should all lead to one thing - to gathering questions, creating resources answering those questions and organizing them.

You should ask how to… and someone will just give you a wiki link, or… create and give you the link. UE is here, for free, for so many years… can you imagine how great would that documentation be by now?

To rephrase: Unreal is only as powerful as the understanding of the people using it.

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You are right, In fact, the average forum user is way, way worse.

We are talking about people who aren’t even able to accurately describe their own issue and who’s posts boil down to “sh*t don wrk. h3lp Plz” 90% of the time.
Here, and on the old answer hub.

And you want these individuals to actually choose an answer? For other people to follow?
Sounds like a great recipe to end up the same way the Wiki did. REMOVED, Because it was causing more issues than solving questions.

That just makes it worse.
The answer will essentially be decided by very few people - possibly the worse types who will literally pick a wrong answer to troll people.
There’s plenty of those in the forum. Maybe you never noticed any. Great for you. Doesn’t mean they don’t lurk out there waiting to post spam in an otherwise intelligent thread.

You have far too much faith in the masses.
Panem et Circenses. Look it up.
Unchanged for thousands of years.

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I don’t see how maybe ~1000 qualified Epic staff people are supposed to handle the amount of questions created by the “masses”, which involves reading, understanding and evaluatiing the questions and answers, while still doing their day-to-day job to work on the engine.

Sounds like a huge timesink to me for giving support to mostly non-paying free users, which is precisely why no company I know of does this but instead tries to utilize crowd-sourcing, a model that to me has proven itself when done well. Personally I find solutions that work provided by friendly users more often than solutions provided by the companies themselves.
Of course, it takes some time and effort on my side. If you do not want spend time and effort, you have to spend money usually. Everything has a cost attached to it, in some form or another. That’s the same for us users as it is for Epic.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see more Epic staff participating like many others do, but this thing being solely run by Epic staff does not sound like a sustainable, realistic prospect to me.

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And I see the same questions being asked for decades and not being answered.
There’s really not that many questions.
All you need is to give a proper answer once.

Users, more often than not (almost always tbh), give bad answers.

What they could do is reward some actually professional developers for giving proper answers with anything but meaningless ladder.
Some cash would be the best, but even a store credit is better than a spit in your face (like another migration that deletes years of your contribution).

I myself could probably answer many more questions than I do, but:

  1. I have a job and answering questions here gives me nothing. Honestly, people in a local hackerspace donate me seven orders of magnitude more for helping them with some trivial stuff than here.
  2. If it all be in vain eventually, why even bother?
  3. Even if I give an answer, there’s no way for others to verify if it’s the right one.
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Really? So lesser companies (who make a fraction of the money) that do this like for Unity or Cryengine are suckers?

If you make a section to answer questions, you need someone from staff to answer questions too.
Give internal incentives like paid days off every 20 questions answered or something.
There’s billions of way for epic to make this internally rewarding and actually “compete” with other companies which provide way better support and more open communications with their user base.

Why would they do that when they can treat us like questions answering slaves?
@ClockworkOcean can illuminate us on this.

Also, while I don’t have a link for it, not even sure if it made the move tbh, this topic has been previously discussed, pretty much to death with a ton of similarly good ideas.
Ranging from setting bounties that the user asking pays for to having Epic pay out bit coin (Which they legally cannot) to having question solvers rewarded with marketplace cash. Etc.

The possibilities to improve are pretty much endless considering the state that the forum is in, in terms of engagement and accuracy of responses being given…

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