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[meta] Approval process changes
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I am tired telling new users that they need to spend a little time learning how to format their code, or spending my time formatting code for people. I'm going to get ruthless at just rejecting questions where the user hasn't put any effort into their question. The FAQ is pretty explicit about what people need to do. Obviously I know many new users don't read the FAQ, or spend time searching on Google or Answers. Grrr. And it's unfortunate that the messaging system on Answers isn't activated, so users who's question is rejected won't know why.
If anyone can think of improvements to the FAQ, please suggest them. Or, if anyone has got good suggestions for why my new moderation style is crazy, let me know,
Thanks!
Your the closest thing we have to a boss around here. If you want us to get tougher I say we get tougher.
Would be nice to have some more options for doing things about questions that have passed the mod queue. I know they will come with more karma, but until then...
How about we start downvoting to avoid stupid questions and upvoting to encourage good ones?
There are many reasons why a question should be rejected, but without a way to communicate to the OP, I have difficultly being ruthless. Shortly after the Send $$anonymous$$essage feature was supposedly fixed, I was pushing back fairly hard when I was active in the queue. After I found out it was still broken, I backed off. Here a list of potential reasons to reject questions
Not enough context for an answer
Unformatted code
Discussion/design topic (Forum)
Basic, duplicate question I could answer in a line or two or by referring to other material
Title does not reflect content
Recipe questions and other write-it-for-me questions
$$anonymous$$ultiple, different issues in a single topic
Not a Unity question
Comments as questions
As a guess, 2/3 of the questions in the queue fail one or more of this list. Do we really want all the questions to just disappear? Is that how we want to present ourselves as a community?
And why has the Send $$anonymous$$essage feature been mostly broken for the past year? If there are legal issues or huge technical issues, could we come up with another mechanism like leaving rejected in the OPs list of questions? We could publish and close questions rather than rejecting them, but closed questions still get comments and answers.
It seems to me, that a lot of questions aren't about solving problems that'll also help others, there are questions that'll only help the askers as issues are too localized. If there was a different answers category/domain for localized issues, there would be a cleaner question system and there will be a proper question database ins$$anonymous$$d of very localized questions.
Just for info, I reject any question that is just made of one sentence, Spam (obviously), basic questions such as Null reference, why Unity is not working or any common mistakes and questions that are more than 5h old. The latter because for once, the asker may have found a solution or he asked again so it becomes a duplicate and it was approved or he simply gave up. If he is still after the same pb, he will ask again.
The problem for users like me (people using Unity as a working tool) is that if any problem occurs we are unlikely to get any help since my question is not of the starter kind. It then gets drown in the depth of UA and never gets answered.
When I started with Unity my questions were simple and answered within 1h (check my history) nowadays after 3 days I get a mere 15 views because the title is not attractive (aka does not include Null Reference Exception).
Helpers have gone to a point they consider $$anonymous$$arma to be important (maybe they think it will get them a job or pay the rent to have 10k or 50k, let me tell you it won't...) so they prey for easy questions and ignore the more complex. This has gone worse ever since the moderator limit has been dropped to 1k. $$anonymous$$y advice, put it back to 5k or even 10k you will see a significant improvement but a drop of easy questions...
Answer by badweasel · Feb 02, 2015 at 06:44 AM
For me, so far Unity Answers hasn't been as helpful as just asking on Stack Exchange. Especially for a new user to Unity and to UA who has only 1 point.
I'm constantly googling and trying to find Unity answers that are probably trivial to some. And sometimes when I'm bored I look through the questions on Stack Overflow and the Game Development Stack Exchange and answer questions if I can. I'm not a super user on either but I do have enough points to use the site properly. I'm not a noob at coding or a noob at game development. But my experience is in open gl. I've only been using C# and Unity for about a month. And a lot of stuff in Unity is foreign to me right now.
A few weeks ago I posted a couple of questions, figured the issues out on my own, and then deleted them while they were still waiting for moderation. One was something that stopped happening when I quit and relaunched mono develop. I think the other was too broad of a question. So I felt it was better to just delete them. Because of this I didn't see how long they were going to last in a mode of waiting for moderation. But it seemed like at least several hours if not overnight.
But this weekend I asked a question that in my opinion was fine. Very typical of what would be asked on SE. In fact, once I realized that it was going to be in moderation for a while and not knowing how long it would take, I reposted it to SE Game Dev and asked it there as well.
30 minutes later someone on SE was giving a thoughtful answer and trying to help me understand. Within an hour or so I had 2 possible ways of doing what I was trying to do. And later that evening I put one of them in to action, and learned a lot in the process. Got my code working!! Isn't that the goal?
But my version of the question here got rejected with no visible explanation.
If there was no SE I would STILL be trying to figure out how to accomplish that thing. How is that good for Unity as a company or for the community of people trying to learn how to use Unity?
In my opinion, you need to loosen up a little and give people some grace. Let the community moderate a little bit. Because when I look around on UA I see a ton of people with little or no points. I see a lot of answers with no votes. And it appears to be because it's too hard to get points. If I ask a fairly legit question here, one that on SE was taken seriously and someone viewed and gave some thought to. One that someone answered there and the answer helped me. If I'm not allowed to ask that same question here - how will I ever get points. And if I can't enough points to vote up an answer - why would I contribute to this site? Not to mention how is that going to help someone else who has that same question?
Don't you want the community to contribute? Or would you rather have a site that is so strict that no one can use it or be human enough to show themselves vulnerable? To me SO / SE are working really well. And UA just isn't. I don't even know if I'm wasting my time right now as I'm sure THIS answer will go in to moderation and possibly rejected. But this is a legit answer to your question:
If anyone can think of improvements to the FAQ, please suggest them. Or, if anyone has got good suggestions for why my new moderation style is crazy, let me know,
Your new moderation style IS crazy because it cuts the site off at the knees. And I think maybe it's harder on NEW users and not so hard on established users with points. Not sure. I just know that for me right now the way things are I see no reason to ask questions here. And to me that's bad for UA and bad for Unity. Because in a welcoming environment I am potentially a contributing user.
There has to be some middle ground between what is happening now and whatever wild wild west thing was happening before. Don't just reject questions out right. SO marks them first. Then the user has a chance to reword the question. Then eventually they get rejected. I've saved people from bad questions before. Helped them ask it a better way and answered it. Because I could see what they were really trying to ask when the moderator couldn't.
Also, I just want to say that it's not the end of the world to have some amount of repeated questions if they have different slants or are asked in different ways. In fact it makes it easier to find things. In SO/SE people very often point to "hey your question might be answered over here". Sure if it's a complete repeat of a common question thats one thing. $$anonymous$$ark it as duplicate and link to the other question. THAT helps the community. But on SO/SE this doesn't happen before the question is even posted. It's posted, then marked as a possible duplicate, then with a couple of votes it is marked as a duplicate. Same goes for off topic or poorly written questions. Those are marked first with some delay giving the OP time to rephrase or focus the question.
I think I share a sentiment with @badweasel. I always put care into my questions, I keep digging and update my question if I find an answer in the hope that it will be of some use to other people. Despite that, I've found UA extremely frustrating to use. The fact that I still cannot upvote good questions serves as a constant re$$anonymous$$der. I think a large part of this is the "community culture" though. $$anonymous$$oderating UA might be a lot tougher than moderating SE/SO as there are relatively many "how I maek game?" questions here.
Great, that's one less issue to fix then.
So, we discussed lowering the threshold for voting up a few months ago. We didn't lower it then due to reasons, but decided now to test letting anyone with a UA account vote up posts (including users with a reputation of 0 $$anonymous$$P.) There are users who may hang around on UA for a long time without asking/answering posts, but through searching find many useful posts that solve their issues. They want to be able to reward the users behind those posts, but can't since the limit has (until this moment) been set to 15 kp. We want to encourage users to search more on UA, since there are so many helpful posts around here created by the community.
If we see this being abused too much, we will reconsider increasing the limit again.
I think the ship may already have sailed on Answers being some Occam's razor of insight with only high level, code hardened, experts asking and giving Questions/Answers that have never or rarely been asked before.
I also don't think that's a bad thing. I agree with a lot of points @badweasel say's although @meat5000 is 100% right about how easy it is to get 1k karma, I'm living proof of that!
What's in a name?
Let's face it Answers is badly named, yes I realize it's supposed to be more like Ultimate Answers but it's not called that. You genuinely wouldn't get a better name to honey trap a new user.
Hmmm I don't know how to do this, I'll check the Unity web site
Hey look there's a button marked Answers, bet I'll get help there
That's just how people work, if you want to change that, well good luck with that one.
What's in a name 2?
It's called Unity but I've seen plenty of occasion where "F-you-nity new user" would be just as good. Not everyone, by far, but some certainly, I guess that's also just how people are.
What's in a language?
This one really gets my particular goat. I live in England and am, therefore, fluent in English (not that you'd tell from my typing - but I am and I are :¬) ). Am I really supposed to delete a question because the person asking is bad at English? I mean really, I'd be screwed if I had to ask a question in another language, totally screwed. One of the reasons why I stick with site users other people don't go anywhere near. I can't imagine how I'd cope if faced with translating code and language and then facing a torrent of abuse for not making my point well enough.
Really though my original point is the one I think might hold the answer to the issues with Answers. Abandon the idea that's already gone and setup a new site for pro/serious users, call it something that won't get the new users immediate attention. $$anonymous$$eep Answers but loosen the controls so moderation isn't such a pain and new users can ask how to link one script to another each and every day.
Set the new site so only people with lots of $$anonymous$$arma can get there but make sure supplying answers on the current Answers is expected as well. Yes there will likely be some overhead in running 2 sites rather than one but, as far as I can see, everyone wins.
Serious devs get their serious site back, noobs don't wallow in moderation hell getting increasingly anti Unity. The community grows, Unity becomes a bigger market force and more people are likely to take up Pro.
Addition to my post as I wasn't clear what I was proposing. When I said "only people with lots of karma can get there" I meant to post or comment. It should be view-able to all, indeed we all benefit from some of the incredible $$anonymous$$ds out there but have a protected area for high end stuff so it doesn't get swamped with everyday questions.
Allow really good questions to move up to this area if agreed. $$anonymous$$ay cause issues if the OP can't comment on their own post so maybe have a pass for the OP on that question.
Likewise, we all have bad days (me more than most it appears), so an unwise post can get relegated to normal Answers to keep that area clean.
I actually think the degradation in Answers is totally predictable and also essential. Products evolve over time and Unity most likely started with a core group of users that were already heavily involved in game design.
But as the masses, and I'm one of them, find out about it the need for a place called Answers to be friendly for noobs grows. If the insistence on only using English remains then the need for leniency on the clarity of questions grows just as the international user base grows.
We still need an area for those who are well up on game design though, somewhere most posts raise key questions about core issues but let's try and understand product evolution and the sea-change in the number of users that aren't experts is real & not going to go away. Change happens, I doubt Unity would fail if we kicked off all dubious or unclear questions but it'd be colder more barren place, harsher and off-putting for new users.
For the record I would never, without some provocation (there's always a caveat!), think badly of @meat5000, @tanoshimi, @Bored$$anonymous$$ormon or any of the too numerous to mention others that make UA such a valuable resource. Count up those $$anonymous$$arma points and you'll see how many people they've helped over the years.
We need that area where such august company can stroll the pathways of enlightenment and discuss the finer points of Chinese Number Theory or the ineluctable modality of the visible (or whatever it is clever people talk about) without being tapped on the shoulder with someone asking for help doing their shoe laces up.
We also need a more gentle place for new users. No one's holding a gun to anyone's head forcing them to answer questions and if they are they should be stopped, immediately ;¬)
I'd lay money that lots of new users are able to handle the "how do I get a variable from another script" questions, I also think a lot of the top $$anonymous$$arma people wouldn't abandon the more open Answers completely.
So consider moving the essence of what UA was into a 2 tier system so the big hitters can get a break from answering the same question hourly and new users don't get put off. Set entry to that Answers + area to something big like 20k.
It's just a change in user base, that's all. Change seems scary or confusing, almost always isn't.
Answer by Chris333 · Feb 05, 2015 at 12:50 PM
Hi,
i think people found it annoying to search for rules how to ask a question, especially when they want post the question realy quick.
A improvement could be made by adding a slider to the Site, so that everyone can see the important rules directly. Split the rules into multiple slides, so that the user gets not slayed by the amount of text. Just put the important informations into this section and make a reference to the full FaQ site.
e.g.:
The general idea of updating the FAQ seems fine. But that format, completely disagree. It should be a regular scrollable page of text, the same as the Answers and Comments are on the site, and the $$anonymous$$anual pages.
Slide shows are more clicking, may look funny on some browsers, suffer from the PowerPoint syndrome. And, repeating myself, regular design principles say that the style should match the style of everything else on UA. We don't want people wondering if they got redirected to a different site, or looking for other slide shows in UA.
That is only a proposal. I think that many people dont take a look into the faq section because you dont see it very well on the right section and the amount of text on the faq site leads the user to leave it directly or dont even read it completly.
The idea is more to provide some basic rules directly after the user enters the UA site. The slider was only a quick idea because unity has also a slider on the main page. Of course it doesnt match the design of the UA site very well, thats true but maybe a plain text after the header, which shows directly the most important rules would be enough.
The new platform which we're switching UA over to will have new functionality. One being that every time a user with a reputation of less than 15 kp is asking a question, they will be redirected to the (updated) FAQ page and have to check a box before proceeding to ask their question.
Also, while typing in your question, there will be a drop down list of suggested threads with similar content in the title input field. That way there's no excuse that user cannot find similar questions on UA because these will be suggested before they even post a question.
That sounds good. Hopefully the users will read the FAQ and not only scroll to the bottom and klick ok.
Answer by MrSoad · Oct 24, 2014 at 09:20 PM
Hi all, I only started trying to help people recently and must admit that I struggled with formatting my code at first due to a problem with my Firefox browser. Everything I read said press the 101010 button, what button... I did not have any buttons. I then tried various things to get it to format before switching to Google Chrome, at which point all these buttons everyone was talking about magically appeared.
On the whole I agree with this stance, I struggle to read badly formatted code and inevitably have to paste it into my editor and reformat the lot before I can do anything, which is a pain. However if there is a way for you to see how many posts someone has made then I would urge leniency towards those who are below a certain amount, especially as the system to inform them why their question has been removed is not fully functional.
On a different note it seems that may people who have received the information that they need fail to close their question successfully, not even a thanks in some cases. More importantly with this issue is the lack of any indication for a definitive answer(at a glance, some posts end up being very lengthy) when searching through the Q and A's for an answer. Maybe if there was some sort of limit to the number of open questions that users can have at any one this might be less of an issue... Just a thought, cheers.
(PS : I know this is an old post but it had popped up in the 1st page list and upon reading it it still seemed very relevant...)
Answer by Owen-Reynolds · Feb 05, 2015 at 12:25 AM
"If anyone can think of improvements to the FAQ, please suggest them."
I'm not saying I disagree on what makes a good question, but if you read the FAQ, it's doesn't say any of that. It seems to have been written when the worry was not enough traffic. The three "rules" are very wide open (and they say duplicates are allowed!): 1) detailed and specific, 2) written clearly and simply, 3) of interest to at least one other Unity user somewhere.
"Can someone write this script for me (with long list of requirements)?" meets all three. "Why is this code throwing error 706" meets 1 and 2, and sort of meets 3 (if I got the error, someone else probably will.)
In the Guidelines, they merely suggest many Q's are really 2 parts (gui toggle to change skybox ex,) but "no 2-part Q's" isn't a rule. Super rough FAQ rewrite, in no special order:
o Avoid genre-specific questions, such as "red screen for horror game." You'll get better results if you reword as "tint entire screen."
o If you're just stating with Unity, there is a lot to learn. Most of the problems you'll have early on are solved by reading the many "How to use Unity" topics. We don't mean to be rude, but it's the best way we know to explain things.
o We don't specifically support other people's tutorials. We're a little sensitive if it sounds like our job is to fix everything on the internet :-)
o C# is common language outside of Unity. Which means that many questions about using C# can be solved by looking them up in the regular internet.
o Before posting script error questions, please read the intro to scripting errors guide [note: is there anything now which is good enough for this?]
o Before posting script-not-working questions, use general debugging tricks to isolate the problem. Try to get it down to one line that you know is running (because you print just before it,) but it isn't doing what the manual says it should.
o Many questions about textures or 3D models have to do with the program that made them. You can often find good answers on photoshop/gimp/max/maya/blender sites.
o Questions about games made with Unity are best asked on the game-maker's site. This site is mainly for people using the Unity3D editor to make games.
o [repeat the "gui toggle to change skybox" ex, about breaking a Q into parts.]
Writing is hard and it's very difficult to get the right "try to meet us halfway" tone. And, a lot of the things we think new users should be seeing are a little bit hidden now, or aren't as good as we thought.
Thanks for the feedback! The FAQ needs to be updated, I agree, as it's the only page we can refer new users to.
I just noticed that the $$anonymous$$oderator Guide does mention more of this (says to reject debugging Q's, for example.) But, of course, it's written for moderators (new user: what's debugging? Why can't I get help with it?)
To me, "debugging" questions is a very broad group and some in that group should be acceptable and some shouldn't. $$anonymous$$ost questions that I ask are going to be because I'm trying to solve a problem. Which could be categorized as a bug. Again, I think UA has to decide how useful it's going to be. To me that line is a fuzzy one.
Also.. I will admit that I did not read the FAQ before posting. And I doubt many people do. The site looked exactly like Stack Overflow to me and even pulled my photo from there. So I just assumed that the rules were the same (I think they should be). Changing the FAQ isn't going to fix anything. $$anonymous$$aybe if you pop it up the first time someone tries to post a question, and as someone else suggested, have them checkmark off each point before they can post a question. $$anonymous$$aybe then it will have some impact.
Changing the FAQ will give us something to point to, and will help with hurt feelings -- people now (rightfully) complain about Q's being rejected that appear to meet the FAQ. And it would help moderators.
Computer people generally use Debugging to mean the grunt work of tracing code to locate the source of errors -- wrongly nested ifs, unassigned variables, how x managed to jump past 10... . That's a common program$$anonymous$$g skill, which you can learn anywhere. For example, there are hundreds of places where you can read about fixing a C# array-out-of-bounds error.
Script-wise, what you need UA for is when you've done the work and narrowed it to something in Unity -- starting a coroutine, using AddForce, trying to read keys in FixedUpdate, setting Color to (64,128,32). There are many Q's like that (look at all the ones about Canvases, now,) and those are the ones that grow UA as a resource for others.
Answer by JeevanjotSingh · Jan 03, 2015 at 09:37 PM
I didn't have any complications about the style of approving question . You need to read faq that's really good . But my question about null reference is now copied from anyone . It looks strange for me by changing camera and getting error while it will instantiate the fire when enemy collide so i tried like always in answers.unity and know i got my time waste again just putting it to copied list (i am not angry ,no i can't,i never be for these small reasons but i need to change out the whole design of my game , a little bit disappointing for me) and i didn't get how to solve that .So i think with topics headings you need to checkout a little bit in the description . Now i deleted that question . I don't think so single moderator can really read each second of question so unity need some partners (just a suggestion) ,Hope i didn't said anything that hurt you for any reason . and thanks for doing the hard work .
There's a skill in program$$anonymous$$g in knowing what details are important and which aren't. The same is true when searching for information on Unity Answers (or Google, StackExchange etc.).
There may not be an exact question about a null reference when changing a camera after instantiating fire when an enemy collides, but none of those details are important. There have been many questions answered about "null reference errors" and the answers are always the same. ; all you need to know is that you have attempted to refer to an uninitialised object (i.e. a null reference), and the compiler tells you exactly in what script and on what line that occurred. So look at that line of code and check all the objects have been assigned and initialised correctly. That's it.
This is exactly the type of answer that the $$anonymous$$od queue was built for, and is talked about in the OP. This has very little to do with the OP, and should not have made it past the mod queue.
Oh great if i said something like that needs to be more perfect then i got dislikes and not approved questions and answers from 12 hours , Great answer place . huh?