What can we do to improve the quality of UnityAnswers?

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As a professional game developer using Unity, the super low cost of entry for becoming a developer, and the community it brings along with it, is interesting to me.

Also, the fact that the Unity developers themselves use this site and provide in-depth technical knowledge that isn't readily available or in an obvious location makes this website valuable.

However, other than a few nuggets of information here and there, there is a lot of cruft and not a lot of useful information or interesting discussion to keep the professionals and advanced users really engaged in this community.

Just looking at the questions that often come up, it's pretty easy to see that this website is probably not living up to what it could be. There are lots of issues that are more prevalent here than on some of the "better" stack exchange sites:

Questions that involve a user complaining that copy/pasted code doesn't work, usually because the user doesn't understand the language
Users who do not mark valid answers as "accepted", causing the "Community" bot to continually bump old, answered questions.
Duplicate questions left and right, including going so far as to be able to find answers to what they look for if they just typed the question they asked into the search bar
Lots of "write my script" questions
Very few votes for questions (either good or bad), leading to poor filtering of what questions I should spend my time reading and potentially providing answers for
General game development questions (usually at a super high level) that don't fundamentally have anything to do with Unity itself and show a lack of thought or research on the topic at hand

Joel Spolsky had a very good point about what makes a good community:

The power of the Stack Exchange platform is detailed, expert answers to extremely rare, long-tail, highly technical questions. To get expert answers, you need experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and hard questions, not the basic questions, so that its clear that this is a PRO site, not a consumer/enthusiast site.... and remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around.

Right now, this website attracts very few experts. Part of it, I'm sure, is the low barrier to entry of Unity itself. Part of it is also probably because the two biggest chunks of interesting questions (game development/algorithms and the C#/javascript languages) are probably better covered by different domains. But part of it is how the community here seems to handle itself.

Now personally I don't have all the answers. This is more of an open ended question itself. But here are some of my suggestions:

Vote up good questions.
Vote up answers that are valid
Vote down bad/duplicate questions/comments/answers. Leave comments when you do vote down.
Encourage people to do their own research instead of just asking for people to do the work for them.
Push people to the forums when it makes sense.

Answer 1

Answer by qJake · Jun 07, 2010 at 03:26 AM

I'd like to direct this post towards the few of us (less than 10) who have over 3,000 rep, and can close questions.

When is it appropriate to close a question? Should we close questions that have been community-bumped (unanswered), but someone has clearly answered the question? Should we close questions that aren't questions, or don't belong here (Spam, too vague, not Unity related, etc)?

The only reason I ask this here is, would closing certain types of questions improve the quality of the site? If we closed questions that didn't deserve answers, would that improve the quality for the rest of the users in the long run?

I'm also curious because I really don't know when it's appropriate to close a question (if at all), and I figured here would be the best place to ask, rather than somewhere else here, or on the forums (which I'm sure not many people here frequent).

Discuss. :)

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Ricardo · Jun 07, 2010 at 06:49 AM 0

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I do think that if we closed questions that didn't deserve answers (for instance, basic questions that have been asked 10 times before) or questions that just don't belong ("I can't install Tiger Woods!"), it would reduce the noise on the site. I don't see that's even a question. :-P Even on the forums, if I started rambling about kittens and politics on the iPod forum, I'd at the very least be moved to the Gossip one.

Ricardo · Jun 07, 2010 at 06:50 AM 0

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The issue with non-answered questions is not as trivial. If it is truly a question that hasn't been answered elsewhere on the site (not just this specific instance), it wouldn't do to close it; but one way to stop them from appearing would be if they can be considered answered if any reply has more than a certain number of upvotes (not sure if that's possible, considering the other comments about everything being hardcoded in StackExchange).

Eric5h5 · Jun 07, 2010 at 07:03 AM 0

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Yeah, for sure inappropriate questions should be closed. As for the non-accepted-answered questions, maybe whack people over the head until they accept answers like they're supposed to? ;)

Cyclops · Jun 07, 2010 at 02:43 PM 0

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@Ricardo, dunno about kittens, but politics does seem to belong on the iPod forum these days, unfortunately... But yeah, I know what you meant. :)

Cyclops · Jun 07, 2010 at 03:23 PM 2

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@SpikeX, good news, I've promoted your Answer to it's own Question. Bad news, I've opened it up to the unwashed masses. I disagree with directing the question just to 3$$anonymous$$+ users, since it affects everyone. Plus, someone with 2$$anonymous$$ rep will probably be there someday (and someone with 100 rep might have good suggestions).

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Answer 2

Answer by Adrian Love · Jun 07, 2010 at 04:52 AM

I'm a newbie to Unity, I am also a collaborative learner. I learn best from reading and contributing to discussion.

If people aren't coming here then isn't that a good thing? doesn't that mean that the docs provided were clear? and if I was a developer looking for community, wouldn't the forum be a better place for that?

So what is UA if not for a community run and edited FAQ / Wikipedia like resource? do your statistics count for the people who came to UA, went to ask a question and found the information they wanted with the auto-search?

Duck, Eric, Spike, Ricardo and Cyclops. in my time here I have seen you guys do the most janitorial work without losing your cool and it's paying off. The community will expand at it's own pace.

Time for me to get a forum account =)

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Ricardo · Jun 07, 2010 at 11:49 AM 1

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I'm here nowhere as much as Duck, who I'm sure is not a person but a front account for a cadre of infinitely patient monks.

Cyclops · Jun 07, 2010 at 02:16 PM 0

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@Adrian, edited to fix spelling of @Ricardo's name. :) You can do that yourself, you know, @Ricardo. :) As for the other questions, I'm tempted to try a new Answer, comments are just too small, but here goes. First, my statistics only counted people who are registered, so yeah, people who got here through Google aren't counted.

Cyclops · Jun 07, 2010 at 03:20 PM 0

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Second, the forums are certainly a community-building tool - but so is UnityAnswers, at least I$$anonymous$$HO (In $$anonymous$$y Humble Opinion). Even though it has different goals and features, it's a community-builder - not just an impersonal "ask a question/get an answer/go away" kind of site. :) So the same issues come up, on how to ensure the community plays well together...

Answer 3

Answer by Chris Masterton · Jun 20, 2010 at 08:20 PM

Unity Answers drives away potential contributors by down voting silly/duped/irritating newbie questions,

Yes, they could do more research, but the point is that they didn't. And it's likely they have never heard of Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, Super User, Coding Horror or Joel Spolsky. I have AND my first question got down voted because it "should have been on the forums and not answers". Everyone was very polite about it, but it came across as a little petty. The only reason I stuck it out was because it WAS a stack exchange site.

Please take pity on the newbies. They are already confused, lost and scared. Pushing them away doesn't help anyone.

I propose sucking it up, helping them out POLITELY and encouraging them to write better questions.

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Cyclops · Jun 21, 2010 at 12:54 AM 0

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Just out of curiosity, what was the downvoted Question? Or did you delete it - I don't see any downvotes in your history. As for addressing your point, there's a dozen things I'd like to say in reply, but comments are short. :) So I'll stick at two things. First, downvotes aren't intended as punishment, but as feedback. It indicates that the Question needs fixing, or is a notice to other people that there's a problem with it - so if they're searching for good Questions, they'll know which ones are good by the upvotes.

Cyclops · Jun 21, 2010 at 12:57 AM 1

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Second, I don't know about other people, but I don't downvote duplicate Questions (with one exception) unless it's the same person copying their own Question - which some people do when they don't like the first Answer. So yes, those Questions need downvoting and deleting.

qJake · Jun 21, 2010 at 03:48 AM 2

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I believe that we're building a database of useful, relevant, and overall "good" examples of Unity-related implementations and concepts here, and by downvoting poorly-asked questions and dupicate questions, we're improving the quality of the site overall. I hate to say it, but you really should read the FAQ before you post here, the overall concept isn't that hard to grasp, and the FAQ outlines the kinds of questions that should (and should not) be asked here. It may seem petty, but it's for the greater good.

qJake · Jun 21, 2010 at 03:51 AM 1

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And besides, I believe everyone should post well-worded, thought-out questions (and responses). By posting a short, poorly-formatted question, you're essentially telling me that you don't care enough to put some time and effort into making this a quality question, and thus, I'm not going to take the time or effort to write a quality answer out for you. The amount of readability, politeness, and detail you put into your question is typically the deciding factor in whether or not I bother to even think about answering your question. One-sentence, duplicated, broad questions drive me insane. :)

TaigaStudios · Jul 01, 2010 at 08:46 AM 1

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@Cyclops In my opinnion even when people ask "how do I make an $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$O" they should be treated with respect and replied on how to get started before on projects that are out of their reach such as $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$O. And also a thumb up for those people, who have given the effort to explain starters what does it require to make an $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$O.

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Answer 4

Here's another crazy idea - change the name of UnityAnswers. I've seen more than one comment, such as this question has:

i just thought cause its called unity answers i could get answers here

Of course, technically, the question did get an answer - "check out these tutorials first" - but that wasn't the kind of answer the person wanted.

Maybe there's a different name that would encourage people to do their homework first? Try to learn Unity in general, before they start posting?

Unfortunately, I haven't come up with one :) Any suggestions?

Update: Even StackOverflow is now admitting to have problems with being overwhelmed by low-quality questions. Their solution is to add a new, mandatory FAQ on how to ask better questions. And by mandatory, I mean a sub-10 rep user must go to the page and click the "I'll keep this in mind" button - whether they actually read the page, well...

Answer 5

Answer by FLASHDENMARK · May 01, 2011 at 10:21 AM

I do not know if this has been brought on the table before. If so I am sorry.

New people come to this site everyday(which is good), but as I said they are new and do not fully know how this site works. And the mistake that almost all of the new members make(I did too) is that they forget to format there code, and usually make it allmost unreadable.

So, I think there should be some sort of notificationn/pop-up, that tells the new users to format there code before the post. Whitch would make the code easy readable for all users.

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What can we do to improve the quality of UnityAnswers?

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