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!