Why is this community dead?

[UnrealEverything]

@UnrealEverything

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.

Probably because of that so its all my fault. I wasn’t expecting such a short time between last post and thread being closed though, or rather that threads wouldn’t be closed at all. I was already referring to the warning that appears when you reply to a thread marked as resolved. But I would have liked to see the warning also appear on threads that aren’t marked as resolved if there hasn’t been a reply for X amount of time.

@BIGTIMEMASTER

my issue is that i keep responding to very old post because they appear at top of my feed so I assume they are new. sometimes they are several years old. I assume its just intermittent bug as part of forum overhaul

I’ve had the exact same thing happen. And it must have happend at least once that I didn’t realize I was the one necroing it with my response.

If we have to stick with the current solution what would you say is an appropriate time? Maybe a month?

[BIGTIMEMASTER (Aljav)]

I dunno.

I guess the idea about necro being bad is that you bring up a dead topic which drowns out current stuff. but if current stuff is moving so fast that virtually everything is drown out in five minuets anyway… who cares? I dunno, I am not a moderator, lol. If i accidentally necro a thread I don’t worry about it much.

If i find an unanswered thread and it was first hit on google I think it’s good to add an answer if i have one. just to help out other searchers.

[pezzott1]

Tracked post are now filtered to show unread on top!!

[Hourences]

The 24h thing is not ideal for obvious reasons and that setting being enabled was not the plan. It is going to be turned off. Sorry for that surfacing.
The auto closing was only enabled for questions that had been resolved by the way.

Meanwhile though we’ve started deploying some other updates. You will notice that there have been some forum UI updates today. There is now a notification entry in the left nav too (links to forum notifications) and the top of the forum has an easier to understand navigation and bread crumbs.

Some of this is still currently being deployed so as of right now you will still notice some inconsistencies between sections of the site or some things not yet working all the way (notifications), so hold on a little bit but we hope this will create a clearer navigation.

If you notice any issues or such with this change, or functionality that you can no longer find please ping me and we will get it addressed.

Next up are suppose to be the post previews and likes that are shown in the picture earlier in this thread.
We are also looking at a small tweak in terms of how user names vs display names are shown on the forum as that is currently inconsistent and confusing.

[Roy_Wierer.Seda145]

@Hourences

Some of this is still currently being deployed so as of right now you will still notice some inconsistencies between sections of the site or some things not yet working all the way (notifications), so hold on a little bit but we hope this will create a clearer navigation.

If you notice any issues or such with this change, or functionality that you can no longer find please ping me and we will get it addressed.

Next up are suppose to be the post previews and likes that are shown in the picture earlier in this thread.
We are also looking at a small tweak in terms of how user names vs display names are shown on the forum as that is currently inconsistent and confusing.

I’ve noticed many changes over the past year, is this design process something we can contribute to as a community, by voting / feedback / UI + UX design or advice?
I’m not a fan of pushing small experimental changes to a website especially if things get inconsistent and keep changing over time. I’d rather see a public design proposal which we can perfect as a community before pushing a single full update over the forums in the future.

What currently frustrates me most is the amount of navigation bars, menu icons and the amount of total buttons displayed on screen. It is very messy. Once I’m on the forums I don’t need to see whole lists of categories, tags and suggestions I didn’t ask for and some of the navigation bars such as this one is totally irrelevant when I’m on the forums section.

On the phone this layout is pushing everything into the tiny space as well.

A lot of the forums just doesn’t follow the most basic rules of good UX. Take this page’s design, if I want to do anything with my profile I have to be literally all over the place for profile related actions:

The same applies for actions related to this thread. i have the scroll bar on the right, a toolbar on the bottom, another toolbar when i respond, it’s too much

[Scatter]

Glad the 24hr thing isn’t staying. A case in point against it has just arisen: UE doesn't like my TOptionals...

I marked my question here as answered when told what I was trying to do couldn’t be done. Because I’m a stubborn sob, I kept trying different things and I now know the answer given may be incorrect and would’ve liked to update the thread (but can’t). Discussion/learning/enthusiasm curbed, and more problematically, anyone searching for an answer to this problem in the future may now erroneously believe the same thing (that TOptionals can’t work with blueprints)…

[BIGTIMEMASTER (Aljav)]

that is a great point. just because something is marked “answered” doesn’t mean it is correct :).

i was looking up info about compatibility with set-driven keys in maya and unreal and of all the forum post I found every one said that it was not compatible… luckily I decided to test anyway and it was no problem.

Of course having an ability to close and mark resolved is good but perhaps a “regressed” or w/e people call it would be worthwhile - or at least don’t shut down further responses

[Everynone]

@BIGTIMEMASTER

just because something is marked “answered” doesn’t mean it is correct :).

Especially when the engine is constantly and consistency evolving and new features (and bugs, too!) materialise. Certain solutions may simply be no longer applicable, or misleading.

Also, many a time have I tried to laboriously mansplain how to approach referencing, only for someone to swoop in and Get All Actors of Class → Get 0 ´==> SOLVED! Meh. Pretty sure moderators have the power to unsolve a plainly useless accepted solution, but in light of:

the forum is seeing about x3 the activity as it had a year ago and it has been holding very steady month on month

The sheer volume of new threads is probably unmanageable without a truly dedicated team.

@eldany.uy

Also I notice some usres replied me in some threads and I didnt noticed…not triggered in my upper right avatar with the notification.

I’ve been missing notifications as well, somehow. I’ve noticed this today:

New feature?

[pezzott1]

I take those that were closed during the week will stay closed?

[3dRaven]

To maybe add a suggestion, instead of having to dig into menus on mobile perhaps a stable bottom bar with the most needed info could be static. (it could hide when scrolling down to show full screen real estate but return on scrolling back up)

Perhaps have an extended side menu on swipe left / right at edge of screen

[Roy_Wierer.Seda145]

Just a sketch, ofc you could have a smaller menu growing to content and even further merge the toolbar into this almost empty menu. Reason I show a “My Topics” is that honestly you can add 30 buttons (likes, replies, latest, categories, forum sections) but if you are not interested in topics in the first place you’d end up with whole lists like we have on the forums now.

Same for the search bar, if it’s convenient to show the bar immediately then do, otherwise don’t. but don’t make people search for it. This means you might be best of with the all familiar hamburger menu to pop up a single menu, where you can see a search icon which if tapped pops up a search bar + search results overview. If not, show only other main categories. Don’t use a bunch of icons in every situation, people can read…

V2

[3dRaven]

It would probably be best if you click on the magnifying glass that it would add an input field above the buttons (full width) and auto focus it to let you start searching with an autocomplete similar to your messages field.

Just having it sit taking up 3/4 of the space seems a bit wasteful.

[Roy_Wierer.Seda145]

@3dRaven

f you click on the magnifying glass that it would add an input field above the buttons (full width)

Stuff can just search async while typing the search query, no need for further interaction. tapping the search button or above the pop up field would close the menu.

Think EPIC needs a new web dev team because this is poop

[3dRaven]

Another quirk with the forum is on reply I really think the input textarea should be injected under the post you are replying.

Now it has probably position fixed that doesn’t allow the user to scroll up the post.

Sometimes I want to double check a text or image above my reply only to have to hide my keyboard to do this.

It’s triggered with the down button on android that then doubles as a back button…which on some cases leads to acidentally backing out of the thread.

Also the info below about posting sensitive info could be a one time cookie popup that could dissappear once confirmed. It’s extra clutter taking up space every post.

[Roy_Wierer.Seda145]

I’m calling it a day XD EPIC may contact me personally if assistance is required @Hourences . There is enough to do.

[MostHost_LA]

@Hourences and staff in general:

Time and time again it is made obvious that the real reason this community is dead is your moderators (or lack thereof) - or the current bad ones who do silly things.

It seems to me like you may want to force the upper management to handle the baseline problem before anything else.
Or maybe expel those who do a poor job seemingly on purpose.

The forum upgrades - some of which are nice - are received by whom exactly?

Think about it.
You are constantly berating your user base by censorship.
This is after topics about it have made it clear you should not. Even worse, this is after you have lost tons of helpful users to this behaviour already. Double down, this is also after your staff has promised to change their ways.

For a time, you had it going. You added new moderators, most of them also helpful. Now it seems you are back to more of the same again.

Meanwhile, the forum is a big question mark thats usually answered by 3 or maybe 4 people (all of whom are also in this conversation). And it really seems like some of your moderators are striving to upset new users who actually seem to have the knoledge to answer questions…

I’m not really sure what the end goal is, but if you were going for improving the community it seems that the exact opposite is happening.

Regardless of that…
Closing topics could be a good idea to avoid the usual silliness cauaused by a few malicous users/trolls/id10t5 etc.
But it also removes the possibility for those who should to be able to to expand/review on a topic.

The answer here is actually simple;
Instead of closing a topic alltogeter, how about making it so that only users with a specific status are able to continue the conversation?

New users are just locked out. Period.
They can make their own topic about whatever to get their own question answered (and they often do anyway. The only ones resurrecting stuff are the problem users or fake accounts/malicous users/spammers etc).

Menawhile, users who actually contribute to the community can continue to freely expand on a topic and provide newer users with more answers/better solutions…
Afterall, things often change; What was a good solution last year, may not even be pertinent today…

[3dRaven]

Also with the addition of adding Fortnite to the forum I really wish it would be separated from the Unreal Engine forum segment. Now there seems to an influx of questions in the main forum with breadcrumbs like

Development > Programming & Scripting > question > fortnite > unreal-editor-for-fortnite > fortnite-creative

I got this type of question being in the main engine thread for Unreal, not the Fortnite.

These types of weird mixing and matching of forum areas is confusing and a bit frustrating.

If someone declares in their question that it’s regarding fortnite → then it should automatically go in the Fornite section of the forums.
All UEFN questions should be there too.

[MostHost_LA]

Here is a visual example of this nonsense.
Like why would we (devs in unreal) be able to help with fortnite?

This comes up in “world creation”.
It could be miss-categorized by the user, but it isnt or you wouldn’t see the fortnite tags.

[3dRaven]

The split between forums should be more enforced. All new settings of tags regarding Fornite should be sanitized and removed from the options of creating a new thread inside of the main UE forum.

Best way to stop the mess is to not let users make it.

[MostHost_LA]

@3dRaven

Best way to stop the mess is to not let users make it.

Exact same idea behind locking topics out to people with less “cred”.

If you can’t register a new account and spam the topic, no one will need to fix it.

If you can’t register a new account and spam the flagging system, no one will need to review bad flags…