We should push for more activity on the forums

There’s clearly very little activity going on here and the discord seems to be fairly active. While I think that for “real-time” support the discord is great, lots of topics get buried with time which can be of use in the future to someone. I know that you can search the channels on the discord, but the replies will end up being scattered if multiple topics are being mentioned at once (or if a post is not replied to at all), it can get confusing very quickly. Having a post per issue helps isolate possible solutions and replies that relate to the topic being addressed. We should push for some more activity on the forums to document people’s issues and peoples solutions, so new people coming to the engine can quickly find something they have questions about or want to find a solution for. Other engines have plenty of issues/solutions documented on their forums/reddit where people can just google their issue and be directed to those platforms respectively and it’s very efficient. At the moment the engine has very little resources outside of the discord and that doesn’t really help trying to get people to stick around.

Helping categorize posts within the forums would also help. Have tags for each of the posts to help filter within general topics, bugs, questions/help, requests, etc. I see some categories like scripting and platform sort of have them, but that should be expanded to other categories.

Maybe I’m alone on this, but I personally would love the forum to be more active and I strongly believe it would be beneficial in the long run.

3 Likes

I agree. I don’t even have Discord, so people like me are effectively excluded from any helpful topics there. Forums are a much better place to “archive” issues and solutions. Maybe when somebody asks a question on Discord that is something that a lot of people will likely also want to know, we redirect them here.

2 Likes

I also agree. Discord is important to reach more people, but it is very complex and the chat flow is very fast. It’s also very difficult to find something by searching on Discord.

Mafiesto4 is mostly the only answerer to questions in the forum. If he doesn’t answer, we have to solve the problem ourselves. I specifically add the solution to my unanswered questions, which I found a solution to, so that someone who researches can find the answer.

I have a suggestion regarding this. A thread/subforum that is not on Discord can be opened here. it’s “Contribution” header. There is such a thread on Discord, but that thread is about contributions to the engine. The title/topic here can be used for contribution to users/community.

For example, someone can share the post process VHS effect shader he made, under such a title (Contribution) with users. Or an artist can share an 3d house model he has prepared under this title with users. Or another user can share his fps shooter template under the same topic.

Thus, we can attract users to the forum.

2 Likes

Yes, I agree. I am new to Flax and lurked for a while because forum information is scarce and it would be infinitely better to promote more forum usage than discord.

3 Likes