Is it more likely that unity has put their company at risk by doing something which hurts their community? Or is it more likely that a few members of this million person community are unhappy about some new community guideline?

The forum changes are really just the straw that broke the camel's back for many of us. What Unity says and what they do are two different things. Just a few weeks prior to the forum change, they changed payment processors for the asset store so many people from the US can't make payments. I about had a heart attack when my debit card came back declined. They've changed pricing strategies twice during the 5.x cycle in ways that angered Pro customers. They dump news or drastic changes on us and then don't stick around to respond to concerns or complaints. They have almost zero engagement with the community they claim to love and respect so much. So it isn't just forums I'm looking to replace. There's a good chance that my next game will be made in Lumberyard (if they get proper FBX import working) or Unreal.

When you rely on a company's product to earn a living, you want to know that the company has a similar vision to you. Instead, they've made it harder to get payments for assets, which effects the income of asset store developers, they've made it significantly harder to communicate on the forum, which makes it harder to provide support for those assets. And we have no idea when the next change is going to come down the pike and how it will effect our ability to do our jobs effectively. All of this might be fine if they would engage more with the community. But alas, they don't.

It isn't just a guideline change either. The software they've switched to doesn't even appear to be made for forum usage. If you edit a post, you are given fields for regression status and FogBugz ID numbers. Huh? Doing anything at all, including posting a reply to a thread, requires a new page load. Hit boxes for what should be simple URLs don't work right on mobile. The new moderator controls are so complicated that moderators are refusing to even use them. Notifications barely work. There's no Ajax or dynamic content to be found out the site aside from a popup when someone likes your post. It's bad.

If things don't change, I think we'll all be glad to have a forum to come to and actual discuss game development or related topics without all the constant negativity that Unity brings to the community. There are too many things in this world to annoy me without my job being one of them.

So just to fill in guys that aren't from the Unity board..

They used to run XenForo and it was really solid. They wanted to interconnect more site features so they licensed Lithium. They made the Xenforo forum read-only and fired up the Lithium version a few days later after migrating the databases.

Well unfortunately the migration was a complete disaster. Swathes of posts disappeared, no PM's migrated, no thread subscriptions migrated, the default layout is unanimously abhorred by the entire community, and lots of other problems/complaints. Essentially they went live with what appears to be a completely untested system after the first pass at data migration.

No one likes it, no one is happy and they're currently trying to communicate with Lithium but its all across the pond so time zones bork any kind of rapid scheduling and its taking forever to get solutions on what is involved with rollback etc while leadership is in SF, the forum team is in Coopenhagen and Lithium guys are somewhere else I think.

So while that basically leaves most users trying to avoid the forums now, I wouldn't expect loads of people to shift over to a generic forum with a single section for Unity because it will never compare to the quality, convenience, integration and 'officialness' of the legacy XenForo Unity forums. For myself, I just got a color inverter so I could read the text but all I post there for now is to update my asset threads.

They are rolling back

WOOP WOOP! F*CK YEAH! :wub: :wub: :wub:

Our pleas have been heard! I'm sooo happy to hear this! Time to cash in our promise to pretend the whole ordeal never happend :D.

I have no idea how to embed or quote in this forum

It's pretty much exactly the same as in the good old Unity forum. It just seems that the OnMouseUp event that opens the context menu with the quote button, needs to happen over a certain area of the post. So selecting left to right works better than right to left. Or you could just type the classic bbcode tags for quotes.

Seeing an awful lot of familiar avatars here...

I don't post here much, but I really like to browse since many of the topics contain some fairly in-depth theory on various game development problems. I really like the Unity community but it doesn't have any real spaces for discussing in-depth problems (like Collision, AI, Networking) and is mostly dedicated to using the engine's built in tools (as it should be, it's the Unity forum!)

Of course. Would Unity developers like to have a Unity specific development forum on GameDev.net? If so, we can make that happen. Just need enough people to voice their opinion.

I support that idea. (the same could be done for all other engines I guess).