I almost feel like you’re fighting against yourself on another tangent though. Because the amount of participation feels somewhat detached from the format.
Obviously there’s some relation but the community is in this weird space where it’s too large to be a tight knit group but too small to live off of pure volume. Which has one primary flaw: Quality of responses. As soon as you ask slightly advanced questions the amount and accuracy of responses goes completely down the gutter. To a point where I’ve mostly given up and instead rely pretty much exclusively on my personal or local network.
I feel like this naturally leads to relatively high turnover rates. People join, people ask questions, receive help, pay it back and forward. But that relationship, sooner than later, becomes very one sided. Where you’re just giving, giving, giving.
So either you gotta dive in even deeper and start to really grow into the community and use it as networking opportunity. Or you’ll just move away over time.
That was my experience at least. Being very active in the early years. 14, 15, 16. But dropping off quite sharply as I had other things to do and couldn’t justify the amount of time necessary to participate in such a way.
Edit: Not having access to UDN I’m not entirely sure how it works. But I seem to have heard it’s more than just a ticket system but also including a forum. Going by that assumption, I can absolutely understand the purpose and value. But if you’re syphoning off the truly experienced people into a walled garden, the rest of the community will develop it’s own dynamic that’s gonna be really hard to readjust and improve.
I’m just happy to see that AnswerHub, forums, and etc, are not forgotten by the Epic team.
Some people will always duplicate posts, that’s a fact I think.
I voted for forums only, but only because answer hub feels abandoned for years now. Your main issue is abysmal documentation and lack of actual involvement in the questions.
When I want to use this or that, instead of documentation, I go through the code and search for random forum posts or videos ( including yours). Then I try ro use it and find 1001 issues (currently fighting with the physical asset).
I don’t know where to ask (have more success on reddit or discord), if its something stupid no-one can just point me in the right direction (see the documentation issue) and if its more specific, the right people won’t ever see it…
To add to it, I can also find dead wiki links - so about half a year ago. someone has pointed me to a save system in unreal (cpp side) which was really simple to use but that documentation was on some backup of said wiki… I didn’t find anything official about it anywhere… how is this fine with you is beyond me.
When I was frustrated, i’ve tried Godot and Unigine - especially the second one was poetry. Nice, clean, modern documentation and their staff is active on forums. I was able to take their engine and “just make” a hackaton entry only because of this.
Your involvement - with constant update of the documentation based on questions in the forums is what’s needed, not a new platform.
PS: StackExchange rulez and your reasons don’t affect “us”, they feel “egoistical”, so to speak. Its also a great concept that isn’t that hard to implement on your own, if you actually tried.
My suggestion, if it is possible, would be option b with the addition of one major change.
If you could add something to the forum that lets you pick if your post is a question, and if it is, then it automatically migrates you to the qna site, and also copies your question over too (if you’re being fancy).
My main issue with AH is that most of the answers are really low quality. It seems like no one from unreal actually answers questions on there. I have asked questions in Polycount, Unreal Forums, Ue4 answerhub and on Reddit and AH is consistently the worst place to go for advice. The unreal forums were the best, as the format there facilitates an ongoing discussion and people seem more likely to check back in on a thread after replying. Polycount was also very good. The format on answerhub is designed around a more stackoverflow style one-question, one-correct-answer format and I don’t think that format is appropriate for something that often needs several layers of clarification.
The answerhub is also looking tired and old and appears to be based on an older version of the stack overflow codebase. The newer versions of stackoverflow have more gamification features and things like Triage that allow the community to improve the quality of questions and answers over time. Most of the answers on answerhub read like a post from FPSBanana, where short attention spans and poor grammar rule supreme.
I voted option A - get rid of answerhub entirely it’s really hard work to use it.
But while we’re here, the documentation needs to be updated as a result of people asking questions. In an ideal world, every question anyone asks would be answered by linking to a page in the docs. The reason people are asking is because the documentation is not answering.
I agree redirects/migration is crucial.
I think threaded comments is a big part of what makes AnswerHub/StackExchange appealing and readable. Also echoing @zaha’s comment: I think these are important for reasons others have explained: a.) voting and b.) putting the spotlight on unanswered questions and similar questions.
Some sort of incentivization program would be nice too.
Multiple solutions with voting are critical. Up-votes are more important than being able to mark a question as solved, since the questioner may actually choose a low quality answer as the solution, and then everyone else who comes along with the same question sees that answer first.
Second to voting is moderation (de-duplicate questions, improve poorly written questions, etc). Stack Overflow manages this with an army of volunteer moderators who are gradually granted moderation privileges through participation.
While the current AH is slow and signs me out all the time, it supports voting.
I disagree. The new wiki contains low quality off topic posts (e.g., https://www.ue4community.wiki/page/revision/fa2ce9e7-f103-4b04-96e0-35b88cf1aa4a), pages filled with TODOs, style changes that frequently broke contributions, basic features broken for a long time (image thumbnails), and a zealous individual who tried to brow beat others to follow their personal vision of what the wiki should be in spite of their own stunning ignorance. Epic should have maintained their own official wiki instead of blessing an official unofficial wiki.
I really like how open JetBrain’s https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/RSCPP is. I understand it is not possible to achieve same level, however atleast having discussions would significantly improve bugs discussion which were usually happening on the AnswerHub. I believe even Epic would benefit from these as users could add more repro cases, add aditional info or workarounds. It would not need to be synced back to JIRA, it could be just source for additional information for Epic devs.
I am for a merge, becuse i never understood the separation of those two places, or why i have to go to another (seemingly abandoned) place to get an answer to the same question, that i wrote in the forum.
For me, forum always has been everything, problem solving AND discussion in one place, so i never understood (and still don´t ^.^) why there was another place required.
From that background coming, It was also discouraging to write in the forum, if you see those Epic videos with rankings, who was the most helpful, because of course, it seems to recognize Answerhub only, completely ignoring every great answer written in the forum. And there are plenty of great answers here in the forum.
It would just need a system to mark somethign as an answer, that can be linked to, if someone else writes a similar/identical question, because he could not find the older question+solution.
To me, answerhub always felt like dead wasteland, so I will be happy to see it finally gone and the community stop being fractured between two websites.
Whenever I came to answerhub, I often saw some ancient relics of conversations where actual Epic employees answered with very valuable information. Occasionally even Tim himself. But that ended around 2015 when the popularity of UE4 exploded and Epic staff simply did not have enough time and resources to contribute anymore.
After that, it’s just became mostly depressing corner of either high quality questions with no answers, or low quality questions with low quality answers. The fact that the website is ultra slow, and that the layout is chaotic and clunky by today’s standards doesn’t really help it much either.
I sincerely hope that there will be some kind of proper redirect in place because all wiki links now going to the same “it’s dead lol” forum post instead of directly to their community wiki counterparts is disappointing.
I posted another post on this – it’s super maddening when you’re constantly googling or searching for information and Answerhub is giving me a “License Expired”! There is literally no other way to get to that information, and about 70% of it is useful.
Keep AnswerHub how it is now but change it to no more posting and close all topics there, keep as an archive site. We need the links intact as is because when we Google a UE problem/question we need the AnswerHub links to WORK! Right now I did just that and found what others have reported. “License Expired” when I need to read a link that solves the problem I’m having but I’ll be spinning my wheels probably for days now trying to ask in the new forums. All this move to this clunky new forum was a terrible move and now you want to make the rest of the information out there near impossible to get. For the next few years there will be just broken links to nowhere that developers could have used and save lots of time. You guys are going to kill Unreal Engine for small developers. We could Google an UE question we had before, but now it will be all lost. Going in reverse here. Should have left the old forum up but closed it for posting and called it an Archive and an extra resource and just left it at that. You guys could have then made this clunky new website on a new subdomain.
I have not yet had enough experience using both the forums and also Answerhub. To be honest I was unaware that Answerhub is a paid support service. I think that the info from both systems should be merged as I found it very confusing searching for a term on google and arriving at either site. It has just become very much more confusing as this morning I have a notification that my license has expired.
Its great to know AnswerHub exists as a professional service though. I suppose setting up unreal for the first time and itching to jump into it as well as the completeness on it made me skip past any licensing info that may have been displayed. It may be an idea for the future for newbies to have a countdown timer for Answerhub displaying in the Epic Games Launcher.
For me what is most important of all when receiving support is that:
I can see all my questions / answers in one place.
When someone replies to a post I make, I get an email so I dont need to go looking for a reply all the time.
That explains why when you can find a bug report you entered you get offered to go to AH or UDK.
We’re unable to find any record of this issue. It’s possible this issue just hasn’t been made public yet. If this issue was reported in the community, please request onAnswerHub orUnreal Developer Network if you would like to see the details of this issue become public.
AH does work and UDK does NOT works. Yet the page says it updated in 2020. IMHO the results in this forum are better, This forum inspires me to help others, because its better and more modern than AH
