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The Unity community: We’ve got Karma

March 11, 2014 in News | 3 min. read
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All of you, the community, are freaking awesome! We have almost 2.5 million registered Unity users and quite a few of you, correction, a tonne of you help each other out. This weekend one of our long standing members, Eric5h5, has reached the unbelievable milestone of 100,000 Karma points on Unity Answers! So we're taking the opportunity to look back on the very beginnings of the community and talk to him about his experience.

If you are new to the Unity world, the Forums contain several sub forums for specific development topics, it’s great for discussing larger and more convoluted issues, finding people for your project or just having a chat about the industry. It’s a pretty popular place, last month we had 4 million page views across all topics and for those who have been kickin’ around the site for a few years, you might enjoy this little blast from the past. Welcome to the Unity Web Forums 2005

Forum2005

6577 topics, 441 registered users and the most online at once was 47. Compare this to 2014...

Forums2014

214,465 topics, 473,129 registered users and the most online at once is 17,212, quite a leap from 8 years ago!

We also have Answers, a slightly newer site (compared to the forums) but just as popular as the forums with almost 5 million page views. Answers is run and moderated by the community and is where you can ask more direct and specific questions about any aspect of developing with Unity. Interacting on this site such as asking and answering questions gains you Karma points towards your reputation, when you reach 1000 Karma you receive some moderator privileges which lets the community know you are trusted.

We have moderators on both Forums and Answers, they volunteer their time to make sure our community home is nice and tidy and we cannot thank them enough for their hard work. One moderator in particular, Eric5h5, is the first and only member to hit 100,000 Karma points on Answers, he also has over 23K forum posts and is one of the most active and helpful members of the community. These numbers are huge and we’re preparing to give him some freebies as a massive “Thank You” for all his time spent helping community members both new and old.

I had a little bit of a catch-up with Eric to talk about his experience within the community;

 

-How long have you been a part of the Unity Community?

I started using Unity with 1.6 or maybe even 1.5, and found the Unity forums not too long afterward.

-What drives you to participate in the community?

Initially it was to ask questions about stuff, since I was new to Unity, and Unity itself was relatively new so there were fewer resources available. After I went from having no clue, to having part of a clue, I was able to help people with the things I knew about.

-Being part of the community for so long, how do you think the community has evolved?

The user base is quite a bit bigger, so there's a wider range of people with expertise in different areas. I think that's important since Unity has far more features now than it did back in the 1.x days.

-How has the community helped you over the years?

Initially by directly answering my questions, and since then I've frequently done internet searches and readily found results from the forums and UnityAnswers. I currently have no questions listed on UnityAnswers, not because I don't have any, but because those I've had were already answered. Also, the community has provided a lot of good feedback about the assets I've created.

-What are your tips for a new community member?

By now there's a huge amount of information about Unity, so knowing how to use a search engine is essential. Be aware of the date, though...Unity changes fairly rapidly, so an answer someone wrote a few years ago may not be valid today.

 

We’re extremely proud of the Unity community and all you've accomplished using Unity continues to inspire us, who will be next to reach 100k?

March 11, 2014 in News | 3 min. read

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