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

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Maybe you don’t get it. They DGAF about anything but these questions they asked. and probably care less than 0 on those too as someone has already decided what to do.
Still, it’s worth a try to at least cuss at them some…

It’s not Hourences fault either, I’m sure he’s fought that particular windmill and is just as disappointed in the currently decaying state of just about everything. After-all, he started in the trenches like us before becoming an epic employee. Heck, most of his tutorials are still better than the straight up trash they post on the learn section despite being for UDK… It’s just that if he were to voice he’s opinion he’d be jobless.

So since I’m not an epic employee, and the worse they can do is ban me…

  1. Neither. Give us back the wiki too.
    Who the hell decided it was a good idea to deprive the community of community created content? Fire that ■■■■■■■■. Same as the people responsible for the forum. And those responsible for the marketplace. And those responsible for the website. And those responsible for Q&A on the engine - oh right, those don’t even exist.

  2. It’s not like Q&A gets good answers anyway.
    It’s completely useless since the epic team doesn’t respond or even exist anymore.
    Having a space where REAL answers answered ONLY by the epic team would definitely be useful. But that’s never going to happen.

  3. The forum is goddarn mess since the update.
    If you actually combine stuff then the forum usage is going even further down the drain - ask for usage statistics if you care to know exact numbers. Look at created posts and responses before and after the update.
    From just reading along I can tell you that at least 50% of the daily posts is literally just gone. And no. it’s not related to the time of the year - though IT IS definitely related to all the problems that came with .26 and everyone jumping off the unreal train like flees on a dog getting a bath.

  4. Features? How about epic employees like you actually answering more than each time a pope dies?
    This would be much preferred instead of the usual: some idiot who has no right to even give an answer, gets it wrong, gets accepted as an answer, and subsequently everyone makes the same mistake for years despite the correct answer being the second entry right below.

YOU CANNOT KEEP ON RELYING ON THE GOOD SOUL OF A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE TO ANSWER YOUR CLIENT’S QUESTIONS.
There’s only so much @ClockworkOcean, @Shadowriver &company can do - and unlike epic employees they do not get paid…

  1. :duck: no. Discourse is trash, has been trash, and we ALL (check feedback forum thread to cringe some) told you not to implement it before whoever decided to do whatever the :duck: they wanted anyway went and pulled the trigger on it.
    The last thing epic needs is to turn more social stuff into sheer trash.
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100

Hear here!

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  1. Having a space where REAL answers answered ONLY by the epic team would definitely be useful. But that’s never going to happen.

That place exists, it is UDN. There is so many valuable questions and answers. Basically, AnswerHub where Epic answers. It would be enough if Epic could just change their paid support policy. Some options which can be maybe somehow combined to match requirements of all sides:

Make UDN public (can be difficult because it can contain questions under NDA)
Allow UDN posters to make their question public - in that case it could be copied to some public Q&A site automatically. Similar system works for issues which were probably mostly manually exposed.
Make UDN question posting paid, reading free.

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103

Let’s download/copy AnswerHub somehow! So that we can use it to search for workarounds of old bugs in fundamental features that nobody wants to fix for years. Such as this one: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/1002738/hism-causes-crash-in-buildstandalone-on-reload-lev.html

I’m afraid that the old AnswerHub will be broken, because there was a precedent with Wiki, and our development time will be slowed down. We could anticipate that and prepare. But possibly it’s multiple terabytes of data already

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My advice above all: Hire a better web team, the one you guys currently have doesn’t rise to the challenge.

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Good web developers are expensive, I, for example, require $200k salary and a ton of benefits and a custom contract that will protect me from anything an employer could theoretically do.
Epics couldn’t afford a community manager that can connect us to the dev team for many years, I doubt they could afford a team of good web developers.

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First off, I’d be pretty surprised if it was a question of money for Epic. Secondly, you can easily find web developers outside the US who are experienced and a $40k salary is better than average, and even in the US you can hire for under $100k, so what you personally “require” is completely irrelevant if it’s not an average expectation.

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You won’t find anything decent at $40k.
It’s true that there are a lot of developers, but good ones are rare and good ones who can take on a project of such scope is even more rare.
I’ve tried em. It’s really impossible to find anyone truly capable for this price, regardless of location thanks to the Internet and the fact that a lot of companies are hiring remotely for the last two years.
You can be lucky and snap a developer or two at half the price if you look for years, but just two developers are not enough and such salary won’t hold them for long.
The very last thing you want to happen to your company is for some google to offer your developer something like $500k and he’s gone.
Also FYI: non-compete clauses are non-enforceable, it’s a fairy-tale managers use to hold on not-too-smart employees, it doesn’t work on those who can afford to pay couple hundred bucks to a lawyer.
It’s simple as that: demand for good developers is far greater than the supply, so the price skyrockets. Economy at its best.

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Ok, I’ll bite. In Czechia, $70k will get you pretty good web developers and you’ll easily overpay many companies with that salary.
As to the skill level, well, I’m trying to move from the web development because it is easy and boring (but pays the bills). Backend can be at least somewhat entertaining, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to stuff like network replication, physics simulation, rendering pipelines or embedded systems, OS development and so on…
At the end of the day, it’s a glorified button positioning. You use UE because implementing that on your own is almost impossible. You use Angular because everyone uses it, but implementing your own would take you like a week (been there, done that, with SSR, in js and php :smiley: like ten years ago).

$500k for a webdev… dying here :smiley:

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No, you use Angular because you are a bad web developer who doesn’t understand how the web works and also have adopted the cargo cult bias.
I saw web development situation in Czechia, it’s saddening to the point of being appalling.
Companies refuse to pay competitive salary and developers are running away.
The fact that you call this field “easy and boring” clearly indicates how low you are on the Dunning-Kruger graph.

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Continuing the discussion from Epic looking for your feedback on the direction to take with Answerhub:

  1. nice to have a web dev party in here.

$40k outside the US is probably reasonable for a non senior level position.

In the us, just refer to Glass Door instead of what you think you need. $200k a year is not a web developer salary, it’s the head of IT salary.
Maybe you should poke that bear and get a decent job title to go along with the pile of cash :stuck_out_tongue:

  1. epic DGAF.
    We have all told them to hire a decent team or company a thousand times.
    They keep failing miserably at it, dropping the ball, installing ■■■■ forum software and loosing clients over it.
    They just do not care. See the answerhub key expiring for the last example of stupidity avaliable.

If someone wiped the whole web server tomorrow they wouldn’t even bother putting it back up for a week.

  1. the launcher is more to spy on people behaviors and deploy annoying pop-ups than anything else - and it also serves as a vanity plate.

Otherwise they would be too similar to GOG. And obviously they can’t be fine with that because they have to give you the impression that they are the absolute best.

Nevermind the fact that the last year has shown us that the only thing they are best at is ignoring user feedback…

Last bust not least.
If I were Discord owner I would never sell to epic.
They could pile up all the cash they want - and promise to leave the company alone entierly with written contracts too. I still wouldn’t sell to them.
I’d consider Steam. I’d consider GOG. Just about anyone else…

Also @SlayerGoury
Where are you getting that epic “didn’t have the money”? That’s definitely not what happened.

They have enough money to give it away (even to me, though I doubt I’ll get another mega grant after giving my honest feedback).

They have more money than they would need to actually make everything work.
They simply do not care.

And the reason our last community manager went bye bye is that he was probably smart enough to realize that any and all suggestions he passed along were disregarded.

Why would anyone work for a company that after you - a person paid to do this, mind you - say: this is what the community wants.
Are told " buzz off we do what we want the people don’t count"?

After that happens on 10 suggestions in a row if you have a brain you jump off that boat and go work into a different department or somewhere you are actually appreciated…

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Answerhub has several issues that can’t really be addressed IMO:

  • It’s UX is awful, and it makes terrible use of webpage layout. UDN has the same problem now, when discussions get too long, the posts get squashed to the point they are unreadable.

  • For the longest time, it’s had technical issues, trouble with login persistence etc. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve typed up a response or question, only to find I’m not logged in, and all the effort is lost. It just feels unstable.

  • Too many questions asking the same thing, with completely different responses. Largely because of a terrible search system. It’s quicker and more efficient to google than use AHubs built-in search.

Stack-Overflow style Q and A is one of the best IMO. It still keeps things in a strict Q and A format, and since answers to questions may actually change over time, the most relevant ones naturally rise to the top and it self-maintains. It also has far better search tooling.

The problem with forums is they aren’t maintained unless someone puts in the effort to do it. I’ve been on the forums since the Rocket Beta phase, and lots of the questions that I either posted or answered way back then still get traffic - even though many of them are completely wrong. It becomes way too hard to find correct information on forums because info goes out of date too quickly, and the bad information persists. Because of the nature of forums, the best answers just get buried in other posts.

It’s a shame Discord/IM apps are so terrible at persistence of information, because the most helpful/responsive folks are generally hanging around in there.

EDIT:

Also, look at this forum page just for a prime example of how forum-style Q and A goes. We’re supposed to be finding solutions to answerhub, but the valid responses are being buried by people arguing about web developer salaries which is no way relevant at all to the topic at hand.

It’s much harder to get answers on forums even with plugins, I’m still strongly in favour of keeping the platforms separate - but with linked accounts. Forums are for discussions, not really good for Q and A.

EDIT #2:

Just read the response RE Stack Exchange. That’s a shame.

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My absolute favourite example of this:

The longer you scroll, the better it gets. Those 3 bullet points sum up my experience with the AH pretty well. Stopped using the search long time ago; Google + AH tag + "quote" produces far superior results.

trouble with login persistence

The absolute best experience when providing an answer is… when you’re logged out. You can’t get logged out if you’re not logged in and providing an answer logs you in. Unless you hit the dreaded internal error, ofc… But then you cannot comment unless you log in, it’s a vicious circle.

The current format of Q&A has to go. Any improvement is welcome at this point.

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I was mostly joking

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I think it should be that your posts get noticed as a question as I asked a question before: How to make skidmarks that come out of your car's wheels when turning But I didn’t get any attention and now my post(s) literally get squished out of the home page which is really the only page anyone care’s about, so a Q&A section would be nice as then people could talk about their games and other stuff in one and all the Questions in the other. Also make sure that any message not a question in the questions section get deleted and any question (for noobs) in the Normal section would be notified of the questions section. And I will try until this update comes, along with @Everynone and @AntiGravity to answer any questions even tho im new.

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I don’t mind either solution, however my biggest issue is that I have asked a lot of questions on Answerhub that have just gone completely unanswered.
The solution is to make sure questions, even simple ones, get answered by someone, anyone, who knows what they’re doing. Epic can make it as fancy simple or complicated as they like, but bottom line, dedicate humans to answering all the questions that get asked is the best course.

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It would be great if Epic had someone who sweeps through the questions occasionally and tries to answer them. Right now they’re counting on visitors to answer all questions. Either knowledgeable people didn’t see the question or general visitors don’t know the answer

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Epic could consider doing more with answers. Gather them into a knowledge database, FAQ, etc.
They could also take a look at the questions and see if they need to cover these in their videos and/or documents better, especially if there are a lot of similar questions.

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Totally agree. The community responsiveness is just not there, but it does exist in some forums (blender forum has fantastic community response) but it’s just the nature of each programs base; epic needs to have more than a couple folks competing for who can answer the most questions every week and dedicate some of their resources to giving some feedback more frequently. As I said, I must have a dozen questions over the last year that just never got answers for

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A minor thing that really frustrates me with Answer Hub is the inability to paste images into my posts. Sure, I can screen-cap, save, upload files, but that slightly higher barrier makes my chance of responding with a fully detailed and documented answer with images lower than with a platform that supports the functionality (which the forum appears to support).

I agree with other posters that some additional curation/moderation would go a long way. Just having someone that can add some additional tags to ensure useful information shows up in relevant searches could go a long way.

The last suggestion I would like is a means of tagging documentation pages in a forum post so that from any given documentation page, it would have a list of recent/popular forum topics related to this page. I can’t count the number of times when I’ve gone to a documentation page on a blueprint block only to find it really contains no useful information beyond what is on the block itself leaving me to find detailed explanations through other channels. I think this would help concentrate QA content around specific UE functionality as well as promote/outsource community-driven documentation.

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