Hey All!
We all heard that question a billion times in the Community, right? This is what usually happens:
- Jack raises a question and asks for help.
- The Community experts provide an answer.
- Everyone is happy and the question gets closed and forgotten.
- Then Jill comes to the Community and asks the very same question again, because she failed to search or just got lost in the information jungle and didn’t find the answer.
This is soon to be over.
In an ideal world, Jill would have found the answer before raising the question again. Let’s see how the new SAP Q&A platform will help us reach that.
The new beginning
When we launch the new Community, the Q&A platform will have a fresh start, meaning that it’s up to you to populate it with content.
Wait, what? What happens to the answers and knowledge we gathered in the last years?
We’ll keep them in an archived read-only format that will surface in the Community in various ways.Where exactly?
First (and in my opinion the most important one) when someone wants to create a new question and starts typing, it will trigger a search in the archive for similar topics. Questioners will then have the ability to find the answer before posting the question. There are a lot of questions raised on SCN that get reported because the people who asked them did not perform a search in the existing knowledge base prior to posting. This creates duplicate posts and unnecessary abuse reports for Moderators. Our goal is to reduce these instances and provide a clean and up to date knowledge base at hand.
Also, still sticking to the topic of search, the Community discussions that get archived will appear in the global 1DX search as well. So these discussions can surface anywhere on SAP.com, including full text and the archived tags that were assigned to them.
And of course you will always have the possibility to check the archive if you need something or want to browse.
Since we want to provide a clean and useful database, some of the discussions/questions will be deleted:
- Questions that do not have any comments or answers.
- Questions that belong to spaces that have been deleted.
- Questions that have been hidden as a result of an abuse report.
So that’s all about the past, now let’s see what our future holds.
Answers… answers everywhere
Our team strives for providing a pleasant Q&A experience by following a similar concept like stackoverflow.
To make the given answers more transparent there will be only one that can be marked as accepted for the question. But if you realize that another answer is better, as the original poster you can change which one you want to highlight as the best one.
We’d also like to provide an opportunity for good answers climb to the top. As a general community member you can help decide whether an answer is useful or not and vote it up or down. Items having the most votes will appear on the top to help us to find information faster.
Trusted Members
Since we all love our Community and want to improve the way we engage, our new platform will enable users to gain additional privileges in respect to their level of participation. For instance, meeting a particular set of criteria will unlock another level of governance in SCN. This will allow members to play a leadership role in the Community while encouraging positive behavior and higher quality content.
What happens if the same question gets asked twice?
Ideally this shouldn’t happen, but if someone could not find an already existing answer, there is a possibility for moderators to redirect the duplicated question. This means that if a member wants to access the newly added (but repeat) question, they will be automatically redirected to the first one where they can find the answer. If the second asker is not happy with the first answer, they can decide to keep their question and specify or describe better why it hasn’t been answered or they can continue the conversation.
Hope You enjoyed the sneak-peek about SAP Q&A. More info to come, so stay tuned!
1DX rocks! :smile:
Gabi
