Closing topics: Why not do it

[raphael_almeida]

Hi guys,

I decided to post here my little dissatisfaction about the topics that are open and never closed and others forgotten in time, I see so many communities, some simple (common procedures of everyday life) and other very interesting, you think, gee, is there's an interesting question, but then the person does not interact, or worse, when do you think the solution alone does not exemplify what he did to solve ...

I like to "lose" my time here in "Deep SAP" (SCN) as I call it, it's so good to be here reading trillions of information, but it becomes in vain in such cases.

I would like to read their views, and I said something stupid forgive me

BR,

Raphael Pacheco

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

there are actually quite a lot people in IT who have problems with navigation or difficulties with technical devices. Just remember the last meeting and how long it took to get the Notebook connected with the Beamer    And some just forget how it is done, happened just yesterday, a person who closed their question in January posted a Thank you and asked me how to close the thread.

Look how you can engage with SCN, from communications stream, from a forum home page, from a forum content page, general and personal activity streams, not to forget posting via the app from mobile devices. To the surprise of my daughter I read some SCN blogs on TV using my new blue ray recorder.

Plenty ways (features) to post and read the answers, but there is just 1 way how you can close a discussion, you need to open it in a extra window or the same window to get to the buttons for helpful and correct answer. 

The app allows only likes.

And if the user receives the answers by email he does not even need to come back to SCN to review the answer.

Mails with buttons to confirm a registration are well known, but why does the mail with the answer not have the buttons for correct and helpful answer?

If the options to close a question would be as much as posting and reviewing a discussion then I think more questions would be closed.

On the other hand we expect that one closes the question in minutes after an answer was posted. Sure there are some questions and answers where this could be expected, but if you work in a paranoid controlled environment without sandbox and where you need to create change requests in Solman which has to be approved from a round table that only meets once in a month and a comma is wrong set in the blueprint and hence the CR given back to rework ... then it can take some months until you get a transport request which allows development and testing.

SAP does everything to become faster with HANA and simpler with Finance, but I would wish the organizations would adopt this simple and fast in their admin processes.

[raphael_almeida · Accepted solution]

Good point Jurgen! I forgot the part of the project itself and the high bureaucracy of companies.As applications, I will be honest, it would MUCH of a SCN app for cell phones, how I suffer to access on my phone, the browser sometimes does not help. Access mostly SCN for him, but just get in reading and giving likes and ratings, to comment and / or reply chat is practically impossible (My friend and teacher Antonio knows well) prefer to do on the PC, but do not always have time for this (do more night when I have more activities)

[Matt_Fraser · Accepted solution]

Yeah, frankly, I pretty much gave up on trying to access SCN from any mobile device.

As for all those old questions in which I participated that never got closed, if I spent time worrying about that... well, I'd worry a lot. But, as Jurgen says, sometimes it can take a while before the OP has a chance to actually verify the correct answer worked for them. I have certainly seen cases where a question that is a couple months old (and inactive) suddenly gets closed/marked correct with a comment from the OP stating "sorry took so long, had to run it through change control, but the solution works, thanks!" Definitely understandable.

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

I agree that we'd see more closed discussions if this option was available through email or mobile app. Perhaps it should be something on the wish list for SCN 3.0.

Even though I've been left wondering quite a lot myself whether what I suggested helped, I never bother looking back and calling for OPs attention. When I remind others to close their discussion it's usually not the one where I participated but those that keep coming back for weeks because people keep replying (sometimes with the same information).

Actually another idea for SCN 3.0 - maybe close the discussion after say 30 days and send an email to OP that it was closed as "assumed answered".

Which reminds me I should look for my own discussions and get some closure on a couple of them.

[stephenjohannes · Accepted solution]

You know I have come to realization that topics never closed on SCN is one of those certainties of life such as taxes and death .

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

Stephen Johannes wrote:

You know I have come to realization that topics never closed on SCN is one of those certainties of life such as taxes and death .

True that. But by leading healthy lifestyle, for example, one could hypothetically expand their lifespan. So "an ounce of prevention" wouldn't hurt here too IMHO. Not in the way Jurgen described, of course, but a gentle nudge here and there might help to some extent.

As a side note - it would be nice to have some clean-up effort on SCN. While doing Google search I frequently come across multiple discussions on the same subject that either cross-link each other or have conflicting answers or have no meaningful replies. Personally I'd prefer just to find one helpful answer instead. Might be an interesting Big Data project.

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

we had just such cleanup question in the moderator forum, I calculated the effort this way: 148000 discussions in MM, knowing the speed of the platform and my Internet connection and assuming that you can take care about 2 discussions in a minute then I would need about 329 full working days to review only old discussions, without having a chance to look into the new entered content.

I can live with those  if the answer is right, but today I saw a post in SD with a wrong answer and checked existing other discussions and found countless with the same wrong answer but rarely one with a correct answer. And this illness spreads because some "helpers" do not answer from their experience, they answer based on the answer in other old discussions.

And disappointing too is that almost nobody came back to say that this answer does not work.

[custodio_deoliveira · Accepted solution]

Jürgen L wrote:

we had just such cleanup question in the moderator forum, I calculated the effort this way: 148000 discussions in MM, knowing the speed of the platform and my Internet connection and assuming that you can take care about 2 discussions in a minute then I would need about 329 full working days to review only old discussions, without having a chance to look into the new entered content.

What are you waiting for? Chop chop!

[Steffi_Warnecke · Accepted solution]

Maybe for this cleaning effort, the team could ask some trusted deputies per space to help them out checking the old discussions and flag them for you in some way, so that you know, which discussions should/could be deleted. A kind of pre-selection to help get you started?

[Matt_Fraser · Accepted solution]

Jurgen, I think you just enumerated a good reason for responding to old threads!

[raphael_almeida · Accepted solution]

kkkkkk

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

Jürgen L wrote:

 then I would need about 329 full working days to review only old discussions, 

Lloyd Christmas: [...] What are my chances?
Mary Swanson: Not good.
Lloyd Christmas: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary Swanson: I'd say more like one out of a million.
Lloyd Christmas: So you're telling me there's a chance... YEAH!

(c) Dumb and Dumber

If you give me a link to the post with a wrong answer I'll make sure to unleash the wrath on the offenders. Unless you've already taken action.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

If they answer based on (incorrect) answers in older threads then they land on my blacklist very fast and dont get very far with it.

Luckily we implemented stricter moderation (= not free for all points mongering) in the security forum back in 2008 already, so there was only a small backlog of about 10k threads and we took out the really pestilent ones in a weekend project based on search terms for noise. When those still left pop up to the top again or are mindlessly linked to because of the search term then I simply delete them. All referencing links should be broken as well!

So as long as content quality remains OK, the backlog only becomes a problem again if used and it is dealt with case-by-case then.

Works for me.

However I do agree that if noise volume was very high for very long and the points frenzy is still going on, then it is quite likely that it will be difficult. You must first get current content quality under control, then take on some searchable "delete on sight" offenders, then switch to cruise mode...  🙂

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Another approach to it is that if you want to find a needle in a hay stack, then just burn all the hay...  🙂

-> moderation based on quality content with strictness based on the noise level and aversion to searching beforehand. Then torch the hay whenever it is plagarised or linked to to make it current again.

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Stephen Johannes wrote:

You know I have come to realization that topics never closed on SCN is one of those certainties of life such as taxes and death .

You forgot to mention silly SCN points addiction and sex with what in your mind is your ex-girlfriend..

[raphael_almeida · Accepted solution]

Good point Julius kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

[Former Member]

please check this tread....

not closed

http://scn.sap.com/thread/799147

incredible... 2008.

thanks.

Hey Raphael good blog..

[Former Member]

Hi Raphael;

Based on my little experience here I may tell you why some do not close there threads.

I guess because some times there are a new comers and they just trying to get benefit from the forum and if they stucked one or two times and could not find what they are searching for or they could not implement the provided answers to solve their issues they might leave their threads open and they even may not use the forum any more.

Moreover, some are using the forums to get their aim, in another words, if he/she opened a discussion and then they get an answer for their issue, they may not care about the general ethics and forums protocol. They just take their answers to solve their issues keeping their discussions open behind them.

So, I am afraid to say that such issue will be existing as long as people are using the forums.

Kind regards;

Ahmad Mahmud; 

[moshenaveh]

Thanks a lot for the input you all. Let's loop-in

[tamira]

Thanks Osh, but I already had an eye on this conversation

[raphael_almeida]

They are facts of life KKKKKKKKKK

[Jelena]

Raphael, if you're asking why people don't close their questions then I don't really have an answer - beats me. I'd agree that any discussions that have no replies and have been opened for, say, over a year should be just deleted. But when there are any replies it becomes very tricky. Some questions might actually be answered (it's just OP never bothered to close them) and we wouldn't want to remove those since they could help someone else.

The "abandoned questions" (i.e. where OP didn't provide enough detail and never followed up) are probably in the most annoying category here. I've actually had an idea posted for 'Insufficient detail' button that would alert the moderator and hide the discussion (and subsequently delete after some time) until OP updates it. Well, let's see what the new SCN platform brings.

The only thing we can do know is to remind the "owners" of recently answered questions to close their discussions (I just use a link to Jurgen's blog above). I've seen other "SCN moderator helpers" do the same and had some success.

@Miguel - Google -> 'generate random string site:sap.com' finds 405 entries, including a code sample. Unless you had some peculiar requirement (and forgot to mention it) this should be sufficient IMHO. On resurrecting old discussions Jurgen has also posted a blog explaining the reasons.

[raphael_almeida]

I once put Jurgen blog about closing discussions, but I stopped because I thought it was criticized for moderation on repeating it (If my memory not fail, I was already alerted).

Could this be my initiative a good practice to help those just starting out?

[JL23]

If someone thanks the contributors for the solution but does not close the discussion then I think it is okay to show him how to do it.

What I certainly do not like is to see that a user reviews all the unclosed discussions where he participated in the past and resurrects them by adding a link to my blog. I see this pretty often on weekends and consider it more as asking for points instead of helping future readers to identify the correct answer more easily, although I have nowhere mentioned any points in my blog.

[joseantonio_martinez]

Dear Raphael:

Several threads, blogs and documents was posted related this topic, and some user improve thier acctitude, but other do not change the bad behavior.

Just for mention some examples:

Regards

Jose Antonio

[Former Member]

Hey here other Spanish Blog that talk about:

http://scn.sap.com/community/spanish/blog/2015/04/18/porque-se-debe-de-cerrar-una-discusi%C3%B3n

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi Raphael!

i am totally agree with you, i see simple posts, and not closed not know why. sometimes, the person say, helped me your code, but not close and or mark the answer as helped.

I have 1 thead opened (Abap on Eclipse) have 3 months and not closed, because havent time to test, i need give me myself time.

i have a situation:

i search a problem sample:  "generate random string", found the thread (this thread was posted on Sep 2007, by sample), now May 2015 i add a comment, the moderator not approve the comment because:

Reason: Please don't resurrect really old posts  <---- in this post the person not closed the thread, and i asked if exist a solution or share any code, link to the post: http://scn.sap.com/message/15877620#15877620

whatttttttttttttttttttt (i understand is a old post but why not).

Ok ok is old post... understand, open new post, with title: "how to generate random string"

and you mention the threads you visited.

Surprise!!!! not approved because is a Basic question...

arghhh not understand, can you explain a little more?

Thanks.