Further thoughts on Qlik Community Guidelines

[stevedark]

It's good to see that there are now some published Usage Guidelines for Qlik Community , thank you Sara Leslie for adding these to the site.  I had been thinking this was something that was required and drafted my thoughts on what should go into some guidelines.  Some of these items have been addressed in the official guidelines, others have not.  I would welcome the thoughts of others as to whether any of these should be incorporated into the official site guidelines.

1. Please search for answers before asking your question, some common questions have been asked (and answered) many times already.

2. Please mark answers as correct or helpful when they are either of these things - this helps other users find answers to their questions and assists those looking to give advice to find where their input can be useful.

3. Do not post the same question into many groups - pick the one that is most appropriate.  This reduces duplication of threads and means that thoughts on resolutions to issues are all in one place.

4. Please use the Community to increase your knowledge to solve your own problems - you should however not expect other contributors to necessarily provide fully working applications in response to your queries.  No one has a specific duty to do your job for you!

5. Posts that simply state that you agree with another contributor add little to a thread and can often simply add clutter.  If you think a response is a good one please use the Like button to acknowledge this - future readers can then see that a much Liked response may be worth extra consideration.

6. Do not upload other peoples work without proper attribution - or better still post a link to the other material so that it can be viewed in context.  Under no circumstances post copyrighted material to the Community.

7. Be careful when uploading data to the Community - an example of an issue can be helpful but please ensure you are not sharing sensitive information.

8. Get involved and enjoy!  Qlik Community is a great resource and you will get out of it what you put in.

Those are just my thoughts, I'm sure others in the Community will have their own thoughts.  Feel free to share your comments below.

Steve

[valerio_fatatis]

Steve,

very good document and analysis

[Peter_Cammaert]

I differ a little bit on this (keeps the discussion alive)

Aren't you arguing for a Google-like effect when searching for answers: a massive return of useful-useless-double-old information through which everyone has to wade, hoping to find the one?

Currently I'm more inclined to think that searching the Community would improve a lot if old questions without correct or helpful answers would simply be archived or deleted altogether. For me, the latest identical question with your correct/helpful answer is sufficient. It seems that would save you some time as well.

[stevedark]

Nice thought!  The only draw back is many of the questions that do not have any helpful or correct answers flagged on them do have perfectly good answers - it's just that the initial poster has not flagged them as such.  A bit of human intervention would be required - I don't expect Sara Leslie would be too keen on that approach!

[IAMDV]

Hi Steve,

Great thread! Thank you. I've posted something similar 18 months back. I've posted as documents and hopefully they'll help everyone.

How to get answers to your post?

It's not about the answer, rather it’s about the question!

Cheers,

DV

www.QlikShare.com

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

I don't think archiving or deleting is a good idea. But adding a date range option to the search criteria would be nice. This way the user can decide to include or exclude discussion or post older than xxx.

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

Perhaps an option can be added similar to a Like. A sort of 'I think this is a correct answer' button/image. The result could be shown on the right, just below Bookmark and Liked. And on the post that people mark as a correct answer.

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

I was just about to point those out . So I'll point out this one instead: Preparing examples for Upload - Reduction and Data Scrambling.

Further resources that may be of interest:

www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html‎

www.albion.com/netiquette/

[Peter_Cammaert]

Yes, I agree. But she's not alone. Managing a forum/knowledge base/resource library is a collective undertaking of both officials and participants in order to avoid the creation of such bottlenecks. Other Community moderators sometimes intervene in discussions where I post an answer and tag it as correct, so that practice is already "common".  Although it usually mystifies me why and why so soon...

Let's assume that only very old questions would be archived. Wouldn't that put just enough pressure on posters to obey guideline #2 at the risk of being "deleted"?

[#10]

Gysbert,

Certainly the search tool could be enhanced with

- version

- date range

- solved or not, get helpful answers or not

- type of QlikView (desktop, server ....)

etc.

I have used the search tool several times: I got the answer i was looking for, but after looking much into the threads (other people would have posted a question before that). The only classification between them is the text you are looking for: what is the degree of relevance of each thread? If you do not use the same words, you do not get the right threads.

Much more difficult to implement: a rating made by experts to rate answers, in order to rate these threads and make them appear prior to others. Perhaps the existing recommendations made by users could be taken into account by the search tool.

Even more difficult: make the users look for existing answers before posting a new question.

Fabrice

[stevedark]

A previous version of the Community had a better search on it.  One of the things that you could check for was whether there were any responses to a thread.  When looking for threads to post answers to it is much easier to respond when there is not a whole stream of conversation to wade through first.  Just being able to filter on answered/non answered would be good - though the icon gives a good indication.

The biggest problem with the search, as Aunez says is how little it seems to get used.