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

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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Imagine having a couple of simple use examples of every node there is…

image

How have you already gotten your hands on Metahuman 2 creator, eh?

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The 1st rule of aquistion is…sue Apple. 2nd rule is sell cosmetic items to 14 year olds.

I completely agree. I’m sure the community would be happy to contribute to making these. The work that Mathew Wadstein has done on YouTube with his WTF/HTF series is a great start:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOVfF7PfLbRdVEm0hONTrNQ.

And the functionality provided by blueprintUE (https://blueprintue.com/) gives us copy-paste functionality right from the web!

here my experience with unreal forum answer and reddit:
the answer for me was totally frustrating i never had a single question and or help get from the answerhub it was totally wast of time, in the forum i had some here and there, maybe the place where i got “more help” was on reddit, but i really feel overal which at last both unreal forum and answerhub where not so “friendly when comes to help” and share or learn stuff be from unreal dev team or be from others users, i feel which we have too “much secret” and i don’t want to share how i do that or that, find yourself!!!, i really feel it’s not so "friendly when comes to support only really few times you actually get some help from someone with a good will and patient to help overal you are basically “alone” most of the times which for "new peoples trying to learning and making the own games make stuffs hard, because the only real way to learn is go look for youtube tutorials and others places which normally you only get the “basic” but when comes to more “complex stuff” or "learn by yourself or pay me to teach, being clear i only feel that for when comes to “help peoples about the engine” ofcourse when comes to just "chat talk those places are fine but if you want to learn anything better go to another place because specially answerhub and also forum you gonna get disappointed most of the times, while sometimes you can still find some good peoples whiling to help and share they knowledge overal most of the times is just wasting time and have a empty post.

i really would love to see some improviments on this side to it be more helpfull for new comes and have more “good souls” whiling to help/share stuff than just learn by yourself alone.

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Pro tip. When wanting answers it’s often best to write in plain english and triple check your spelling(s).

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Here’s an actual pro tip: Help us help you and, at least, break it into sentences. I run out of breath reading that… @Ellessarr

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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