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:
- 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.
- 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.