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

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144

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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145

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).

146

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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147

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:

148

“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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149

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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150

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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151

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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152

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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153

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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154

Me and a few epic employees occasionally did just that.
I happened to be a moderator on answerhub, and whenever I came across a thread and someone answered the question without it being highlighted as such I would highlight it.

and I know of at least a handful of unreal developers who do the same thing.
It all depends on our workload though, but if we have time, we def. check answers.

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155

Hm, getting the feeling we might’ve talked past each other. I didn’t mean Epic staff shouldn’t participate or mark good answers, I agree that they definitely should. I wanted to say that I think this shouldn’t rest solely on their shoulders only, because it sounded to me like you want to say only Epic staff should be able to select answers as solution. But maybe that was just me misunderstanding you.

I don’t know the Unity or CryEngine communities tbh, how are they handling it?

Thanks for that, really appreciate it!
It’s always great to see when staff members chime in to help. :slight_smile: :+1:

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They have mostly direct staff involvment.
You send a bug report, the reach out in less than a week. Epic used to do that. They stopped doing that too. The send the automated reply and that’s pretty much it.

You post about an issue with something-say lack of shadows in orthographic view (Silly example).
One of the actual developers will leave a post explaining why the ortho view has no shadows and telling you how to make it have shadows/where to modify source.
Say, that’s an example, but Unity is doing pretty much this for the hdr features…

Well, I did mention a few options. So, sure. It’s possible.

For me,
The best solution of the bunch is to have both an official answer and a community answer.

Say there’s a simple question like…
The character stutters when walking backwards.

There’s about 3 real answer and a cheap trick that works.

The community is using the cheap trick that works - increasing blend times on the animations.

They accepted this as an answer, however it is not an answer.
Once gfx get enough fps, the mesh will likely stutter again.

The proper fix, is to split forward and back movement out and have backwards movement have its own animation blendspace with walking back as the center animation.
You then have to refactor locomotion to walk either forward or back.

Do you think the community would ever go with that answer when increasing a value by a smidge appears to solve their problem?
Never :stuck_out_tongue:

And that is the real problem.
The community will not do what is proper if whatever else works.

This is one example of around a thousand actual answers that were in answer hub.

We all try and help when possible - Maybe too much in my case as I’m always reading the forum :stuck_out_tongue:

Still, there’s some serious concern about what is “proper” and what the community likes to do that has to be addressed.

I figure the best way is to offer both options/answer with the one posted by Epic being visible before the community solution…

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157

AnswerHub itself was fine… for most of its life. “Improvements” broke it… and that insanely (ridiculously) low logout timer made it difficult to answer a lot of questions at all, because if the answer was complex enough you couldn’t type it and link up the requisite visuals before it timed out your connection.

The merging into forums idea… is viable if they provide new users direction to it.
If they continue to focus on their training tutorials, they’re going to be driving away new customers because the kind of people who like to be placed on rails and driven through learning something aren’t the kind of people who make it in game development.
Creativity abhors stricture.

If they leave Users asking Users for help and getting it, the way the AnswerHub has always been, it should go over just fine. They haven’t pointed people to the Hub in ages and new people still find their way there every day to ask questions… so putting it where they’re looking already… and telling them where to find it, should bring the hub back to life.

… but there are so very many ways they can do it wrong… I really hope they don’t mess it up.

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158

Abandon hope.
They’ve royally ■■■■■■ this up at least three times already.
Fourth time is unlikely a charm.

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159

Welp, guess this was ignored. Note this thread, where all links have been destroyed and the thread is now useless:

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160

Another thread where the answer is behind a link that is now broken: Make object hover/bounce in mid air using Blueprints

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161

Another broken answer: How to lock axis of niagara sprite emitter?

Is it possible to get these images back? Is that a work in progress? I’m pretty surprised given the amount of backlash about broken links from previous migrations that this would happen again. This thread gave the appearance that there would be consideration and care taken in this migration.

162

I hope thats sarcasm.
Theres a better chanche that leading an elephant in a china shop and scaring them with whatever scares them would result in no broken porcelain…

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163

Maybe it was wishful thinking. Sigh.

Guess I’ll just continue to post every broken link I find in here. It’s legitimately nearly every search result now.

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