I have noticed that a lot of the important staff posts are not pinned in their respective categories! For example the following post in Getting Started!
I like that there are posts pinned in the Announcements channel but with the current setup everything just blends together. So possibly changing pinned posts to have a different color background to make them stand out more to new members! Something that just gives more attention, so when you are first visiting the forums you don’t just casually scroll past thinking eh this isn’t anything important. The tiny pin icon on the left isn’t enough of a clarification that it’s something we should read first!
Yes, I agree that it’s hard to see at a glance which posts are most important, in the Forums sections! Color coding would be a useful step. And color should never be the sole marker of importance, because some readers are colorblind.
Something else that I notice is that once I read a pinned post, it’s marked “This topic is unpinned for you; it will display in regular order”, which means that it moves down in the threads like a normal post would. But sometimes after I read a pinned post I still want to see it at the top of the Forums, because I need it for future reference. If we could unpin it ourselves that would be different, but I automatic unpinning buries posts that I still want to see.
A good example of this is Flak’s pinned post in the Issues and Bugs channel that explains the formatting for post titles with the Normal, Minor, Major etc, and the descriptions of what each severity label means. I already read it but sometimes I need to refer back to it for a reminder, and it’s totally buried.
Another type of post I would love to see permanently pinned on the top of a section is a description of what the channel is for. For example it’s unclear what the difference is between Asset Creation and World Creation. And I thought Getting Started was for very initial questions about opening UEFN and navigating the editor interface, but I see complex art or mechanics questions in there too.
I really care about the Forums, because when the Core forums got off to a slow and confusing start, by the time Manticore tried to fix things creators had already migrated to walled off Discords and Manticore couldn’t entice them back.
Thank you! Right now we are tied to what Unreal Engine has since we are a private forum in that forum. Once we move to our own instance, we can definitely look into making changes specific to our forum. I’ll see if there is anything I can do to make them more noticeable in the short term.
