Hello guys, why are there many unanswered questions and requests here? Where is the best place to join as this forum doesn’t seem to be useful in many cases?
4 Likes
Hi Adberf
There are many questions that get answered daily. You can see how many people are active by looking at the “weekly karma” panel.
Sometimes questions take a while to get approved before they appear in the “unanswered” section, especially if they are submitted by a new user.
Because there are so many questions coming in, the community can be selective on which ones get answered. I.e. if they match their expertise. Another reason why questions get unnoticed is if they are worded very vaguely and do not provide the basic information / logs / screenshots to allow us to help identify the issue or offer suggestions.
There is also the official Unreal Engine forums where you can reach out to, but I wouldn’t say this community is dead 
Good luck.
Alex
3 Likes
I’d like to second this by saying that most questions are asked in such a way as to make it impossible to answer.
Vague, no diagrams, no information about what the user has tried so far, or so all-encompassing as to make them unanswerable.
Then you get the users who won’t apply what they’ve already learned and just post strikingly similar questions day after day.
I also assume a lot of people who answer on a regular basis aren’t tempted by questions of users they know never mark the answer correctly.
In fact, I reckon about half the unanswered question fall into that category.
6 Likes
Thank you, guys. That is true of course many users do not ask their questions clearly; however, I think in general Facebook groups dedicated to UE are probably the best place to ask any kind of questions from beginner to pro. My issue was completely unresolved here on this platform and many other people had the same issue as I had, so I asked my question on Facebook and within hours I could fix something that felt extremely bizarre. Anyways, thank you.
I want to echo Adberf, I’ve posted a very detailed post hoping to find some answers but I realize that this forum isn’t too responsive.
I don’t see why Epic isn’t injecting more support here. I’d def increase the base of people interested in the engine on a long-term basis.
1 Like
I assume you’re talking about this question:
I didn’t see it the first time (I only read certain times of day, and can’t read all questions.)
However, that question doesn’t say anything about the most basic debugging steps.
There are a number of things that can fail in your blueprints. For example, “cast to first person hud” may fail – and you would never know if it did.
I suggest you put a number of “print string” calls in the “success” and “fail” cases of each step of the way. That way you can verify where it’s stopping. Note that a final-shipping build removes the text from the screen, but it still goes to the log (assuming the “print to log” checkbox is checked in the Print String action.)
One thing that varies between editor vs shipping is what the startup map is. Maybe you’re loading a different map, and that map has a different gamemode, and that gamemode doesn’t create the same blueprint class instances, for example? If so, the “cast to class” might fail because it gets the wrong class instance. That’s one of many possible failure points; I recommend adding lots of “print string” to verify that things you think should happen, actually happen.
2 Likes
Hey jwatte
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I’ve added all the debugging options possible. Even going back and forth in version control and chatting with other devs about possible workarrounds. I have discharted any possible obvios causes as the output does not display any warnings nor other alarms that might help to isolate the issue.
I checked that the functions I’m calling are not test-only and the package settings include all the info needed. I’ve also added all the debugging prints, but this won’t solve the issue as what is actually happening is that the shipping build doesn’t seems to load the function as in the rest of contexts does. So, still not finding a solution.
But as I said, thank you for responding even if it was indirectly.
Naldo.
Your post does not say that you have added the print strings in the various cases, and it does not say which functions are being called and which functions are not being called in each case. It’s also not posting the log from the PIE vs Packaged versions, showing those calls being/not being called.
1 Like
i usually like trying to help out in my down time but its just too noisy these days and its very rare to find an actual proper question. Most the time question askers are missing so much prerequisite knowledge that it’s basically pointless trying to explain anything - unless you were sitting with them going step by step they won’t be able to understand. And that’s just the nice ones who at least mean well.
The real problem for me is types who ask a bad question to start with, then give curt, sarcastic, unappreciative replies like, “nope, didn’t work” or “I knew that, I tried it already”, etc. These are the people who make you not want to help at all. No, there is not a ton of them, but if community grows 10x then naturally you see these types 10x more, and its not somehing I want to see in my time off.
Most the time though you don’t even get a response if you write a lengthy answer.
6 Likes
The very question posted - ‘why is this community dead’ is completely useless and serves no purpose.
I have just been responding to another - ‘Why are there no good C++ tutorials’ which irritated me.
I suppose the best thing to do is ‘ignore them and they will go away’ as I was often advised by my parents (and I am pretty old). Humans don’t change too much it seems.
1 Like
All you said is so true man!
I login all mornings looking if I can help someone to learn/advance something about UE.
I am not sponsored at all…I dont get anything for this…just the good feeling of being useful for people I dont know…I just love Unreal and want to help. Period.
Last months I found harder to help because of attitude or post formats like post with topic: please help! or things like that…also that replies like ‘I know that and I tried already’…Idk…its becoming harder to help. And I dont know if Epic can do some smart move to fix it.
Also agree about people asking for help on challenges like:
“I want to make a game like fortninte but I just installed the engine, please help me”
6 Likes
Just want to drop this here: thank you for this thread. And thanks to all the others that have already answered. Those answers match my experience exactly, I would give more than just one like if I could.
Over the past few weeks and months it started feeling more and more like a huge waste of time for me. Some of the problems Epic could probably fix. For example I still haven’t found a good way to find all new threads since my last visit without having to keep scrolling a never-ending list where I have to hope and prey I remember the point at which I stopped earlier. A mouse-over preview of the first post of a thread would also be really helpful when browsing the list of threads. That would allow me to directly ignore any question with poor quality without having to open it if I couldn’t determine the quality from the title already. That in turn would allow me to spend more time on the actual meaningful good questions. Being able to downvote bad questions (or alternatively upvote good ones) could also help in this regard.
Other than that I guess most of us read and answer the forum in their spare time which unfortunately none of us have an infinite amount of. While we could babysit every problem until it is resolved, that’s simply not possible without being compensated for it in some way.
An example for a bad question that I’d just ignore would be any code (C++ or Blueprint) without any explanation or context given when there is no indication that there was some attempt to debug the problem, ideally with an actual debugger but I would have accepted print-debugging as well.
I do hope Epic can somehow pull this around and make the forum actually worth our time again.
4 Likes
upvote / downvote would be good.
One thing that I think makes problem worse is how patiently mods and some others actively work with the low effort posters. Like somebody just post some code and says, “it don’t work” and then others spend enormous effort trying to work with the person. Like, forums should be for “how do I fish?” not “give me all your fishes”.
Of course people have to learn and be pointed in the right direction, but if they cannot post a proper question the first thing they should be pointed to is a standard “how to post questions” sticky, and until they’ve done the bare min prerequisites they shouldn’t be getting any attention at all. Community has to have standards after all, you can’t just let beggars take the place over and turn it into a dump.
Too much infinite kindness and patience isn’t a virtue - have to train people to be a certain way if you want community to be worthwhile.
2 Likes
Yes, Epic are doing their level best to stop us helping people I mean, why get rid of the part that showed which posts were new?.. ( exasperation )
I found this works pretty well
https://forums.unrealengine.com/search?q=status%3Anoreplies%20tags%3Aunreal-engine%20order%3Alatest
1 Like
Seen a lot of this today. It has a “wrong again, SERVANT, don’t come back until you have the correct answer!” feel to it
Bad upbringing, I would say…
5 Likes
Thanks for the thoughts everyone.
Generally the forum is seeing about x3 the activity as it had a year ago and it has been holding very steady month on month, so things have grown a lot but that also means seeing more entry level questions or some of the other things being raised here that can affect the experience for you all or change the atmosphere. I am very open to ideas on what we can do to manage the scale of things without losing in other areas.
For vis, over the past year 35k threads marked as questions have been posted. Of those about 30% was resolved, a suspected another 30% probably or partially, and the rest was not.
As for practical steps - I am thinking something like this:
–A sticky on how to ask a question, and the moderator team being more proactive in replying to very basic threads and pointing them there.
–There are a few people part time on contract to reply entry level questions. This is meant to help new users get help and feel welcome. We will discuss how that is going and if we need to increase or do something else there as current coverage is limited.
–Organize further Epic staff involvement, aimed in a more targeted kind of way at a selection of the mid to higher tier questions generally. We will not be able to answer everything though, given the number of questions, but we can help like everyone else.
–Forum UI changes, see below.
Are there any other things? For example make the solutions button more clear? Remind people through a notification to accept a solution or respond to their question when they get a reply but have not yet responded after X days? More visible badging or recognition for you the experienced people responding?
For the latest posts - we do have the latest button at the top of the forum, that links to the place jwatte posted. Is that type of displaying of threads ok or are there things that we can add to it? What if it possibly previews the first line or two within the latest list, as an alternative to the popup UnrealEverything mentioned?
We have likes, which is kind of our upvote. Generally people use this feature little though, if we’d sort by that I think the number of likes/up or down votes a thread might have might not be enough to sort it correctly as you’d depend on just one or a few people’s votes. Thoughts?
And somewhat related we are also about to do a header update for the forum that makes the nav options simpler and easier to understand as a lot of the options can be a bit confusing UI wise and do not look very clean or thought through right now. We will have simple breadcrumbs so you can navigate posts and categories like folders.
And we are also adding the forum notifications in the left nav.
We are tweaking things all the time so if there are ideas and suggestions we’d happily look into figuring out how to implement those.
Thanks for all of your help and engagement!
10 Likes
sounds like a good plan to me.
Not related but a light theme for forum would be nice. It’s summer here and I like to take the laptop outside, but I can’t read these forums at all when I do :(.
lol, theres thinking… outside the box?
2 Likes