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· Aug 17, 2017

discipline in community

#DC Feedback

It's a general problem that feedback from users is often quite poor.

Discussion (15)6
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Stephen Wilson · Aug 18, 2017

I find RSS feeds for subject groups are useful way to identify new posts. There are sort and filter options for:

  • my feed
  • most votes
  • most active
  • no answer
  • unanswered
  • new
  • all

I think all online forums suffer from 'unhelpful' and 'badly described' posts. Maybe sorting by 'most votes' or 'most active' would help?

The behavioural issues you describe come from people and it is hard to design a technical solution to "fix" people. Most forums I have used give kudos to users who provide a lot of technical detail and frown upon users who ask one line questions showing no evidence of having tried to find a solution themselves. On balance, all forums need to treat beginners and inexperienced users with respect. We are all ignorant of something and we all have to start with nothing (no knowledge)    

Don't be afraid of up-voting or down-voting posts. Sometimes it's useful to link to an older post that dealt with the problem rather than duplicating questions/answers.

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Robert Cemper · Aug 18, 2017

I totally agree that technology can't fix lack of education or lack of politeness or lack of interpersonal skills.
I also have no problems with beginners or not searching deep enough into documentation.
Also publishing subjects that someone finds important or new / updated
That's the purpose of a community as I understand it.
But then I'd expect something like : SOLVED, FAILED, OBSOLETE.
 

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Evgeny Shvarov · Aug 20, 2017

Hi, Robert! Nice topic.

Often if OP stops asking and commenting that means that problem is solved ;)

Votes can indicate the value and usually mean the post is helpful/unhelpful.

Answering on your comment: we have the Accepted answer option. But the answer can be accepted and the problem either SOLVED or FAILED. We can introduce SOLVED, FAILED and OBSOLETE tags for the questions which would be available for the OP. 

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John Murray · Aug 21, 2017

Currently we don't seem to have a good way of reminding/encouraging the OP to accept answers. If we add a suitable comment to their post, this means everyone gets the impression there's new information on that post, which rises to the top of the "most recent" list.

Maybe DC could periodically send each user a list of their questions that have at least one answer but none yet accepted.

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Jeffrey Drumm · Aug 21, 2017

I like this idea; it's probably easier to implement than some other solutions.

I also think that a "Please Read: Community Etiquette" link on the main page might increase followup participation.

That said, I believe that part of the problem may  be that this is a vendor-hosted community forum rather than independent; I suspect many users may view this as "WRC-lite" and have a sense of entitlement based on their ongoing financial commitment to ISC.

I co-moderated the STC-User mailing list for many years, which had some 1600 subscribers (the group was focused on a succession of integration products from STC/SeeBeyond/Sun Microsystems/Oracle). It was completely user moderated and hosted, and while we had no formal "solution accepted" or "like" feedback mechanism, there seemed to be a stronger sense of community among a greater proportion of its members. Very few questions went unanswered, and few answers went un-thanked. Of course, my memories may be slightly rose-colored by my optimistic nostalgia filter :D

It could just be a matter of the relative newness of the DC. STC-User was born in the late 90's, grew to its peak in the mid-to-late 00's, and started circling the drain in the early 10's. 

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Sean Connelly · Aug 21, 2017

>I suspect many users may view this as "WRC-lite" and have a sense of entitlement based on their ongoing financial commitment to ISC.

I came to the same conclusion.

If I was new to DC I could easily think that everyone providing answers is an InterSystems employee and not realise that volunteers are giving up their time and goodwill to help others. Regardless, its still nice to say thank you.

Perhaps it should be made more obvious who are volunteers and moderators?

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