The Snippets repo contains attempts at cross-site scripting hacks plus tests. I reported one and realized that that asana site is just too difficult to bother with. I would suggest you have a report link that just sends the page to a mod rather than going to another company’s page to fill out a form that has more boxes and questions than an online shopping cart . A website report link for externally provided content should be effortless to be most effective.
There appears to be three snippets entered by script kiddies/spammers and four by real accounts “testing” the snippets repo.
These are obvious by either gibberish or test in the subject.
Totally agree, it probably should be something like “BlueprintUE.com” where users could copy and paste code, listing snippets from all users could be really messy and counterproductive (and this also applies to C++).
I really don’t know why should I browse a list of random snippets instead of looking for a specific one
Hey all, we understand the current flow for reporting is a bit cumbersome, and building out better flagging tools is definitely on our list of improvements.
Thanks for bringing these to our attention - we’ll take a pass at the snippets! The snippet system we’re using is an integration of BlueprintUE.com. We worked with them to bring that functionality to the EDC.
Would you not search through the snippets on this page in a similar way to BlueprintUE?
My comments are restricted to just the report link on the snippets app, not all reporting. The regular forums report link is perfect and I don’t want you to think I was suggesting it needed change. But my real intent to post this was just mention the inappropriate content of the 6 posts which were difficult to report any other way.
Now that I’m used to it, I think this new support site is a vast improvement over the old.
Thank you Amanda for answering me, I wouldn’t really do that (and I wouldn’t do it on BlueprintUE too) and here’s the reason:
BlueprintUE is like PasteBin, JSfiddle and many other, I don’t know anybody who searches inside them because usually the code is pasted “without context” and it’s really hard to find what you need, I always found links to these websites on StackOverflow or in the Unreal Forums (honestly, I wasn’t even aware that there was a search bar in BlueprinUE)
I created a snippet to help a User in the Q&A section (and I already submitted a feedback to the team about the UI and Functions), and now it’s showed on my profile, probably nobody else is going to need, and I felt the need to link the Q&A post in the description to provide some context.
Here’s a list of the things I reported:
The description field is really small
Links are not supported (You have to copy and paste them in order to open them)
Markdown is not supported (So you can’t have images inside them or format text decently)
You can’t give feedbacks to snippets, you can only report them, you can’t rate the “quality of code” and you can’t provide suggestion to the user (As a programmer I learned that there’s always “another way”, and sometimes it could be better)
Snippets appear on the user profile, that would have been cool if they were like a “page dedicated to a snippet and its usage”, not just random code without context.
Creating a snippet doesn’t replace BlueprintUE.com at all, it’s slower because you have to fill other fields (Title, Purpose, Supported Versions) while the other it’s just a copy-paste thing, and you don’t really want to show on your profile random lines of code or blueprint nodes used for scratch.
The solution I’m suggesting is to create a forum category called “Snippets” and let user create regular posts with the possibility to paste nodes inside them Like you can already do with regular code, and obviously extend this possibility to all posts so that users won’t need to open an external website or the “create a snippet” page to paste their code.
In this way you would keep all the forum interactions (comments, likes, flags, et cetera).
In terms of storage it’s even better than uploading a picture (we are talking about few kBs of nodes (that are essentially text) vs several MBs of high res pictures, especially if you use Blueprint Graph Screenshot like me)
I hope I haven’t bored you and I wish you a nice day!
Re search
The most immediate problem we got I think is that the snippets do not appear in Google, we have SEO work left to do we will get to soon (May I hope).
Ratings and Comments
Tutorials are soon getting a rating system + tutorial posts will auto generate a corresponding forum thread, and then link to it. To allow for commenting and discussing. The forum thread generation is done, we just need to deploy it. Some time early next week probably. Ratings will be some time in May probably.
We will then add those same things to snippets too.
Moderation
For moderation we’ve deleted a few bad posts but overall it has been pretty good I think in terms of people trying to abuse it. We look over the lists every few hours usually.
We did not have time before launch to build a proper in-site moderation report feature, hence the temporary solution of an Asana form. We will get to that at some point but other features have more impact we feel so we are doing all of those first. Improved reporting will likely take a while. Will look into simplifying the Asana form meanwhile though.
The 6 points raised
Descriptions are 256 char, also due to SEO + our page layout will break if there is too much text in the description. But I think we should add widgets below the snippets so you can add more text there instead and that should do it. Adding to todo list for devs.
Noted on not being able to add links, adding to todo list for devs.
Will likely be resolved if we do the solution for 1.
Covered above
and 6. Covering in-depth below
Overall Intention and Purpose
You raise interesting points Ares on how people use this kind of stuff. On the sites you list it indeed acts as a true pastebin, you dump stuff there that you need to store for a bit, or share with someone and that is it. What we see happening on our site now is that people are posting IMO more serious and long term snippets that are meant to be a reference library of examples and foundations for how to set up this or that. It starts meshing with tutorials that way.
The question is what direction do we take, or perhaps we just do both?
We do have the “personal” field in a snippet, that is also the default option. We could make Personal snippets not appear in the profile if you all feel that would make sense?
There are many fields but we deliberately made sure almost all of them are optional, so that you can paste as fast as possible.
Or we double down on creating long term reference snippets - and we add in image, text, link support, ratings, comments, and so on so that you can build proper pages surrounding the code you share?
Thank you for the detailed answer! I agree with almost everything and I have a few notes:
That’s correct, but I guess that people don’t use snippets like that is just because it’s easier to do it elsewhere without having to make your profile “full of random code” (even if it’s hidden), as you can see in the thread linked in my snippet another user posted his code on BlueprintUE instead of using the snippet section and he didn’t “waste” his time filling up forms and writing a description to make it accessible to other users (and I agree with his choice in this case)
It would be really good to be able to paste snippets inside a post without having to open another page, but I guess it’s not that easy to implement.
The same thing applies to visualization, it would be great to have the snippet preview inside the post instead of having to click a link.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing to make the default option hidden by default, it would be probably better to create a new category called “Unlisted” that is hidden by default in the User profile but is accessible from everyone from an URL (like unlisted Youtube videos).
I understand. I think part of the perceived overhead of making a snippet post is very much so psychological though, so maybe we can make some UI tweaks and collapse some options.
I am looking at both BPUE and ours at the moment, and on BPUE you got to fill out a title + paste in the snippet.
On ours you have to fill out the title + click “add snippet” + change the type + paste in the code. With the exception of having to select the type and having to click “add”, it is the same I would argue. All other fields are optional ones, none of the descriptions and such need to be filled out.
I think we could do following to aid the people trying to quickly add stuff:
By default a first snippet is added already, rather than needing to click add
All descriptions and such fields are collapsed and need to be uncollapsed for those people who do wish to do those. Alternatively it is tied to Personal. If you select Personal (default) you get to see the basic fields only.
And following to aid people trying to make a proper long term snippet:
Text widgets, link widgets, image widgets just like tutorial editor has
Ratings and comments
Integrating into the forums is a bit hard probably, but let me look into the experience of pasting code or large blocks of text of any kind in general and discuss with Discourse, to start with.
. A website report link for externally provided content should be effortless to be most effective.
