Why is this community dead?

Development Programming & Scripting C++
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21

Rather than a sticky, maybe it’s possible to make the post creation process recommend pictures and code, so they can’t avoid constructing a decent post?

Absolutely nothing wrong with entry level questions. I think the problem is, when someone obviously hasn’t tried anything, or even used google before coming here. Part of the posting process again.

This would be good for more complex questions, for sure.

The interface changed recently, and it’s now much harder to find new posts. It used to be possible to see how many posts were new ( for you ), and stay category independent. That functionality totally disappeared :slight_smile: Like I say, I ended up with

https://forums.unrealengine.com/search?q=status%3Anoreplies%20tags%3Aunreal-engine%20order%3Alatest

But it’s a little strange to have to manually craft a search to be able to find unanswered posts. Scrolling up and down and sorting doesn’t cover it.

Anyway, just providing some input. Keep up the good work :sunglasses: :+1:

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22

To add to these suggestions how about a mandatory field to select the engine version. I’ve come across countless questions where after explaining a solution in depth the OP suddenly mentions that they are in for instance 4.23 in the year 2023 :stuck_out_tongue:

If it’s a question regarding C++ or Blueprints than engine version is a must!

With constant changes to systems it gets harder to explain that something is in a new feature or X feature has been deprecated.

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23

Had this very thing after about 20 pages of explanation :smiley:

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24

Unfortunately cannot reply to multiple posts. I typically just read the “Programming & Scripting” category (for multiple reasons such as personal preference and most experience). So props to you for dealing with all the rest :slight_smile:

My problem with the “latest post” is that it shows everything, so it takes even more effort skipping all the threads that I’m not really interested in. And I will most likely not find the point at which I stopped last time. The custom search seems like one step in the right direction, but at least another step backwards at the same time. If I were to use https://forums.unrealengine.com/search?q=tags%3Aunreal-engine%20%23development-discussion%3Aprogramming-scripting%20order%3Alatest in the future I’d have the preview I was looking for. But at the same time I’d lose the ability to see views/replies as well as who (if anyone) already posted something there.

A preview that just shows the first line like the custom search does would be perfectly fine for me as long as it won’t blow up the size of each thread by a lot. That’s why a popup came to my mind first.

By the way something I noticed shortly after I replied yesterday was that the thread was originally written in 2021. So maybe you could also do something to prevent necros like this. I know there is a warning when you reply to threads that have been marked as resolved. But since that’s not guaranteed to happen maybe there could be a warning after X amount of time has past since the last post so we don’t get these “2 years later” types of situations as much.

The solutions button would probably be a nice thing together with the reminder. Although I’m not really sure that would significantly reduce the number of new threads. Especially if there’s already an existing one that does solve the problem.

The current version of the like system is on a per post basis though, isn’t it? What I was thinking about was upvote/downvote for the entire thread. That could also help new users identify which existing thread may help them with a problem they are having compared to similar threads that don’t have as many likes.

The problem with the current like system in my opinion is, people are rarely encouraged to like good things. Which could explain why it’s not being used much as you mentioned. If there is only an upvote option but not a lot of things get upvoted there is no benefit of being able to upvote in the first place. So the likes wouldn’t be a sufficient criterion alone. I understand the reasoning for not having dislike/downvote options. Especially new users may not feel very welcome if they post a thread that gets downvoted a lot and they don’t have a chance to understand why. So if there was actually a valid reason to like good threads while at the same time not causing bad ones to be liked it may actually be helpful with the current system to be able to see the amount of likes of the initial post of a thread.

Maybe it would help if the “just likes” system be replaced with multiple emojis similar to how it’s done for example for pull requests on GitHub where you get to choose from one of eight emojis
gitemojis

Looking forward to the header navigation update :+1:

Just playing around with ideas: What if questions from new users wouldn’t create a thread on the forum but instead opened a private conversation with ChatGPT first? Here the user would be in an isolated environment where they could ask their question and hopefully get it resolved using ChatGPT’s knowledge. If that fails then ChatGPT could guide the user in the creation process of the thread or even write it on its own. The thread could contain the conversion with ChatGPT as well if desired. From that point the thread would go its usual path through the forums. If ChatGPT manages to solve the problem, then a new thread would also be created, but it would immediately be marked as resolved with the answers given by ChatGPT that were necessary to solve the issue. Of course it would ideally check for duplicate threads first.

25

Ah and one more thing I almost forgot. Is there a way to make deleted threads disappear (faster)? Happened a lot to me that I click on a thread only to be greeted by a “this topic has been deleted by the user”.
E.g. How do I set UE_ENABLE_INCLUDE_ORDER_DEPRECATED_IN_5_2?

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26

I did an anecdotal-level fact checking on this… went to the Audio section of these forums and went to the Audio section of [the other popular engine] and counted the number of topics in the past 7 days which received 1 or more responses…

UE: 13
Other: 18

In both cases there were few un-answered questions.

In any case, some other thoughts about UE help:

  1. I end up getting decent answers and direction from the forums, all the time. It always comes via linking from Google though… I don’t bother searching FROM this website and I rarely post questions / topics. If it hasn’t been answered already then often that’s all the answer I need (aka: I’m doing something strange that I shouldn’t be).

  2. There are many places to get UE help and advice… Google likes to send me to reddit a lot… but it doesn’t seem to be as good as this site.

  3. I think unlike [other unnamed] engines out there, UE is targeting professionals… therefore you can expect some, uh, differences in this community. First off, helping could actually be against the company policy for many UE users (you could accidentally share IP, etc). Maybe stretching here - but honestly in the game dev world, it’s a cut-throat zero-sum game (no pun intended) so me helping you == helping the competition.

27

Maybe have a system that helps walk entry level users through the question asking process - would it be possible to have an automated task monitor activity on questions from newer people and make suggestive posts on how to rephrase the question if there are no replies within a certain time?

28

We have the initial design for a light theme ready and would like to get to it at some point, but the issue is that it is a fairly big task, and needing to weigh that task vs other things. Right now we prioritized work on documentation first as we feel that will have the widest impact, but we certainly want to get to the light mode at some point. Towards autumn maybe as it stands.

Yeah we thought about a template too, we are exploring options. An easy one would be pre-filled in text that is already written in a question post. A form would be another one but that is more complex and may take more time. Let’s see where we end up.

Does the Latest button at the top not do the same though?
image
It takes you here Topics tagged unreal-engine

Yeah agreed. We tried to do that initially but it was a bit hard to do at that time as it needs to happen via the tags. However it ties back into that template topic, so if we find a way of maybe having a template to create question posts then the version can be solved that way too.

Got it, let us concept what a preview looks like within the current Latest page. Will post something here probably this week.

Investigating if we can have a message for necroing threads. Unsure if possible or built into Discourse but we will look into it.

If we do something like that we probably also need the up and down votes to show up in the category/thread views and not just when opening a post. We currently avoided showing downvotes on tutorials for examples out of fear of it creating a more negative feeling seeing people downvoting each others work.

I think the middle way is indeed perhaps simply showing the likes on the category/thread view instead so that you can identify threads that other people liked and must be particularly useful or good.
Then again people will not just like a random question simply because the question was posed in a nice way so none of this actually resolves the original problem we are trying to tackle - how to raise awareness for proper questions via a degree of crowd driven filtering. It is tricky.

Thanks for the input!

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29

Er, nope :wink:

I need to find the ones without replies. And using that view, you soon give up.

30

If that was a thing that happened, then I’d say that maybe their database was getting overloaded with the “which ones are new?” queries, and turning it off solved someone getting paged (in the middle of the night?) for hitting capacity limits.
Just a guess, though, but I find that most things that happen are “the least bad option available to an otherwise rational human being” rather than “an evil plot to ruin the world.”
(I mean, the outcome is the same, but the motivation matters!)

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31

This might be one of those cases where a GPT API integration might actually help.

“You are an editor for a game developer community website. Your role is to improve the quality of questions asked, so they are more likely to receive helpful answers. Please suggest improvements that could be made to the following question:
…”

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32

I’ve had many questions answered here and answered a few as well.

Though there is certainly room for improvement. :+1:

33

I just tried exactly that on a question that I’d had difficulty understanding and it managed to re-word it into something very detailed and easy to answer - it seems ChatGPT is better at asking Unreal questions than answering them…

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34

That’s what I assumed. But I also assumed most of it was done with cookies on the local machine. Not really sure…

35

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.

36

I disagree @cruzetond. i’ve found this place to be generally responsive and helpful. Although I think that will vary greatly dependent on the subject matter…

I will say though, in defence of any noob who posts a stupid/vague/incomplete question, when you’re new to something, knowing the boundaries is sometimes the most difficult lesson. Most of them will have no idea what the engine can and can’t do for them, and some (ok, a fair few) will operate under the misapprehension that their mission to create the next WoW is as simple as plugging one Blueprint node into another…

Maybe we just need more sarcasm around here… “What do you mean you can’t find it!? Just create a new Actor, go into the blueprint graph and plug in the Generate RPG Spell Table node into Event Begin Play.”

Joking.

Maybe.

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38

This is another detail: (post deleted by author)

What is the point of keeping those posts visible?

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39

They’re very Zen… :sunglasses:

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40

There are three kinds of people:

  1. Those who believe the world is evil and fear what the world will do to them.
  2. Those who believe the world is good, and want to help contribute to the goodness.
  3. Those who don’t care.
    Which one you are depends on a lot: experience, culture, genetics, beverages, phase of the moon …

If person of kind 1 asks a question, and then realize/find the answer, they may be afraid that someone in the future will find their question, and believe that they are dumb and stupid for asking it. Thus they want to remove the evidence. Or maybe just want to avoid anyone having to do work to answer a question that’s already answered.

If a person of kind 2 asks a question, and later finds the answer on their own, they will post a reply to themselves, saying “oh, wait, here’s probably what it is.” They likely do this to help someone else who have the same question in the future, because Google will find the question and the answer.

If a person of kind 3 asks a question, and then find the answer, they won’t be back, so, whatevs.

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41

This happened to me more than once:

Face some unknown in the Engine.

Google it, youtube it, finally look for help here, nothing…

Then eventually I solved…I come back here and answer myself so
may be useful for some others in the same path.

Later I face the problem again and I didnt even remember I had it before…

I come here and found the solution I shared before. So I always try to keep
solutions here In the case the future me needs it again :slight_smile:

10 Likes