Dissatisfied with Answerhub response rate

[Jared Therriault]

Hey guys, don't take this as a disgruntled customer. I'm very much gruntled and I love UE4 and definitely am not leaving over this, but I want to talk about something I really think needs improvement.

There are scores of unanswered questions at Answerhub. And for many of them, it's not a matter of duplicate questions. Some just have no information on the internet at all, so these questions going unanswered is kind of egregious. Especially so since the UE team consistently says, "If you have an issue, bring it to Answerhub so we can track it and get you the help you need." But then so many questions go ignored.

I understand there are a lot of users with a lot of questions and many of them are duplicates that can be answered with a cursory search, but there are so many great questions without resolution and it's a big letdown when paying customers can't get their products finished because we can't get some help!

Please consider looking at this issue with more fervor. Answerhub IS a great resource but sometimes it falls short and it falls HARD.

[Adam Davis]

Hi Jared Therriault,

I do understand the frustration here. We try to get to as many threads on the AnswerHub as possible. However, the Support Staff at Epic puts a heavy emphasis on bug reports, crashes, installation threads, and other technical blockers to ensure that we are addressing items that would halt the progress of developers. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to respond to every thread on the AnswerHub, but we do our best to get to as many as possible. In many cases, developers in the community have more knowledge about specific game development practices or theories, and we encourage them to post on the AnswerHub to assist others as well. Additionally, we encourage developers to upvote questions and comment on errors or potential blockers to bring attention to those that they feel strongly need attention.

The reason we ask everyone to post on the AnswerHub is because we can assign a member of the staff to questions so that, while it may take some time, it can eventually be looked at. Do you have any specific posts or areas that you feel need additional attention?

[Hevedy]

Sometimes in Answerhub few users(Staff & Normal Users) post **** or irrelevant replies for no idea why.
But another times users like Adam Davis help a lot, because help you or if not find the bug/problem tries again or search the problem for help you, and that is appreciated Adam Davis thanks you!

[KVogler]

Maybe a good deal of the still open questions on answerhub stem from long ago, like March or so.
Perhaps it might be a good idea to "clean" out the answerhub and remove questions about early versions of the engine that are now obsolete.
If an issue simply solved itself with a new engine version, the question on answerhub might still be aroubd and since the author of the question has no problem no more, he might not follow up on the answer, thus nobody cares anzmore abou the question...

Maybe it would be a good idea to have a button on the answerhub where the author of a question needs to confirm, like every (two) weeks, that the issue is still present and unsolved; otherwise it gets closed. This way Epic can concentrate on questions that are still relevant....

[Shadowriver]

In my case (as somebody that is a lot active there) main reasons why i don't anweser

1. Quastion too general forcing anwserer to post whole lecture to explain things
2. I'm not sure about anwser and/or it's outside of space my current interests or/and didn't dive in to yet and UE is so big that you always finding something new

In lot of cases i'm not actully answering but figure out things for people as majority lacks skill to do so themselves and API reference is my no.1 information source i really recomand people to check it out often if you dealing with Blueprints and C++

AnwserHub same as Stackoverflow (which actully use exact same website system) is suppose to be community driven and i suspect Epic are busy people to sit there all the time. So if you want help AnwserHub, best way to do so is to lure kniowlage people from community or people like me that can easily figure things for people in to there.

[ambershee]

I still have unanswered questions going back as far as June, and several that have been "answered" haven't really been satisfactorily answered :/

I said it over a year ago, and I'll say it again; answerhub just isn't suitable for Unreal 4. It works for Stackoverflow because the questions are small, very specific, and generally being asked by someone who has a narrow idea of what they want to achieve and reasonable prerequisite knowledge on how to achieve that. UE4 doesn't have that same kind of intense focus, so the results are usually not great.

[theknoppix]

Actually answerhub has getting a lot of basic questions other than bug reports or crushes because lack of documentation and tutorials for starters. Once epic fills that gap it will become more useful to see only bugs, crushes or advanced issues.

[Shadowriver]

I still have unanswered questions going back as far as June, and several that have been "answered" haven't really been satisfactorily answered :/

I said it over a year ago, and I'll say it again; answerhub just isn't suitable for Unreal 4. It works for Stackoverflow because the questions are small, very specific, and generally being asked by someone who has a narrow idea of what they want to achieve and reasonable prerequisite knowledge on how to achieve that. UE4 doesn't have that same kind of intense focus, so the results are usually not great.

I don't think it's not suitable, i think it's genius idea to use it, thing is it's not magic 8-ball that some people think it is

[Erasio]

I don't even think it's bad for beginners. There should be a bit more differentiation maybe but especially new people who are just running against a wall because they didn't learn a basic concept or something like this are helped very fast, easy and it is quite valuable for them.

It is a great tool in my opinion but the community is rather small right now and too few people use it from the answering standpoint.
Maybe some kind of motivation would help it. Like one month worth subscription time at something around 3k points.

Since right now I have to agree with Jared Therriault. The response rate and time is rather large.

[Jacky]

Maybe some kind of motivation would help it. Like one month worth subscription time at something around 3k points.

Why do we need that kind of a reward? AnswerHub is a "you scratch my back, i'll scratch yours" kind of place. If you have a specific expertise, like rendering for instance, you help programmer guys with their lighting and material problems and they help you with coding. If you are a beginner you get help, improve yourself and then help the new beginners. At least thats how i see it should be anyway. I have over 6k points but i've never expected anything from Epic in return. :\

I know you'll say we have the forums so why bother... If we didnt have AnswerHub we would have more serious problems with unanswered posts in the forums because of the traffic caused by all the tiny little questions being asked. So feel free to leave(or send over) AnswerHub questions that require long discussions to the forums and answer(and ask) the rest in AnswerHub. Also, most of the time you dont even need to give full explanation of the solution...just giving a pointer helps others solve their problem quickly.

Btw, we now have a direct link to AnswerHub on top of the forum page so go and check it out from time to time!

[Erasio]

Well I'm at 1.4k and a frequent user and have to agree. Usually is that type of giving and taking which makes a place like answerhub or stack overflow thrive.

However it is very clear that some people are way more active and some mainly ask.

If you check out a single sub hub for a time you will notice that like 60-70% of the questions are answered by 4-5 people. Sometimes there's someone new. Sometimes someone goes but it's never a lot.

I mean yea the free subscription time is probably not the best idea but some kind of visible badge or something like that. Any kind of motivation for more people to go there regularly. I know you can get the title supporter and eventually become a mod if you're really active but something more obvious and immediate.

[Errvald]

Stackoverflow works because it's rewarding you. What EPIC should do is open a UE4 tag at Stackoverflow and incorporate their Api here. You'll see most of the questions being answered in few hours.

[ambershee]

If we didnt have AnswerHub we would have more serious problems with unanswered posts in the forums because of the traffic caused by all the tiny little questions being asked.

UDK's forums as a case study didn't suffer that much from these issues

(Nor UT3)

[iniside]

Bah. We solve most our problems on IRC .

Though I can say that I would agree with this thread point, I also can't say that it suprises me. There is way to many questions, and way to few developers, who time to write proper answer.

I can jump on answerhub and give one line answers to some questions, but what would be the point ? It will neither help you very much (at best it will point you in right direction) neither it will help me for that matter.

[ambershee]

To be honest, I don't frequently find relevant questions to answer on answerhub. It just isn't presented well - when browsing the forums I can see around 20 threads per page / screen of information, but on answerhub I get about seven. The forum layout is much easier to read as it also ins't spread out over multiple lines, the thread titles are consistently organised.