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thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril 

New Discussion Board Features - Kudos, Quick Reply, & Search Before Post

I'm excited to announce that we've turned on some great new features for the discussion boards! The biggest new feature is the addition of Kudos. You may have noticed the new blue star that appears on posts right under the user's avatar. The number to the left of the star is how many kudos that post has received. If you want to give a user kudos for their post, just click the star and watch the number rise. The kudos count for an entire thread will show up in the message list so you can at a glance tell which threads are getting a lot of kudos. There's also a leaderboard for Top Kudoed Authors that you'll see on each category board as well as for overall board posts. This leaderboard spans a 30-day time frame so to stay at the top you'll have to be active in the community. Leaderboards are also available for Top Kudoed Posts and Top Kudo Givers. You can give out unlimited kudos, so don't be stingy! Kudos should highlight the quality posts on the boards. 

 

Another new feature is Search Before Post. Now as you go to create a new topic on the boards you'll notice a search drop down appearing as you type in a topic subject. The seach is looking for other topics that have similar words in the subject. This will help you locate any previous post that has already addressed your question, and you can go ahead and skip to the solution.

 

The final new feature is Quick Reply - which you'll see right below in this post! This will allow you to reply right from the post itself without having to navigate to another screen. Because this is a Quick Reply, you won't have the full WYSIWYG controls or be able to paste code; but it's great for quickly answering or asking a follow-up question.

 

I want to hear from you what you think of these new features and what else we can do to make the boards work best for you. There's some exciting stuff in the works, including a new ranking system, contests, and other fun stuff. This is your community; I want to hear from you!

 

Thanks,

April

anassi@salesforce.com

SuperfellSuperfell

Is the quick reply feature dependent on specific browsers? I don't see it in either Chrome or Safari.

Mohith Kumar ShrivastavaMohith Kumar Shrivastava

I am using chrome and i can see the Quick Reply beside Reply button

bob_buzzardbob_buzzard
Quick reply is awesome. Its saving me a ton of time when my reply is asking for more details. I used it for this reply in fact.
thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril
It should work in Chrome and Safari, Simon - I've used both to view the boards in the past day. You won't see the Quick Reply option if you're viewing the boards not logged in - but when you're logged in you should see it.
SuperfellSuperfell

Don't see it, I am logged in, i get this.

 

thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril

Thanks - I'll dig in deeper and let you know what I find out!

Rahul SharmaRahul Sharma

Simon, try clearing your cache. I too had same problem but when I deleted all the history and cache, I was able to get that buttons.

 

I'm in love with quick reply feature, really a time saver!!

Thaks a lot!

SuperfellSuperfell

Thanks, i tried that and unfortuantly it didn't make any difference. I also tried turning the quick reply setting off & back on again, and that didn't help either.

thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril
Thanks Simon, I'm going to kick this up to Lithium support and see what we can find out! Are you using a Mac or PC?
SuperfellSuperfell

OSX 10.7.5, tried Chrome, Safari & Firefox, all the same results.

thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril
Simon, I took a look at your settings and figured out why you're not seeing the Quick Reply. You're viewing the boards in Topic Layout - and Quick Reply doesn't show in that layout. If you want to switch over you can do that in your settings.
SuperfellSuperfell
Thanks, are there plans to fix that? i find the linear layout to be pretty unusable.
thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril
I don't believe so, it's by design to work that way. We can make a feature request with Lithium though!
Chamil MadusankaChamil Madusanka

Hi April,

 

New features are awesome. But what happened to the top tagger section? It has gone. :(

bob_buzzardbob_buzzard
That's a good thing Chamil, even though I was at the top of it ;)

The tags were being abused by people who wanted to be at the top but weren't posting much. Thus you had request for test coverage on a trigger with 50+ tags, including chatter,visualforce, sites etc. The Kudos leaderboard is much better, as it reflects how the community values your contribution rather than how many tags you can type in.
Chamil MadusankaChamil Madusanka

Yeah Bob. I got it. I have seen that too. Some people have misused that tagging. People who have identified the community value, don't do that. It's seems like we have to go with the kudos. :) . Anyway that is a good feature.

Steve :-/Steve :-/

I don't wanna pee in anyone's Cheerios, but I don't see the point in the whole "Kudos thing" it seems like it's redundant of the existing "Mark as Accepted Solution" feature.  If anything it will probably just cause users to not mark the Solution to a question that has been solved properly.  

 

Shouldn't the "Real Effort" be towards moving/combining the old antiquated Discussion Boards to the Answers/Ideas Community so that everything is under one umbrealla?  It's bad enough that we have to maintain 2 separate Community Profiles with code, formulas, solutions, screenshots, links in 2 different locations, and now you've got things like The StackExchange popping up to just further muddy the waters...

Rahul SharmaRahul Sharma
Kudos to Steve for that. Had similar thoughts!!
thisisnotaprilthisisnotapril
Thanks for the feedback! As Rahul just demonstrated, kudos are a great way to say "me too!" on a post. The community is always evolving and we welcome your thoughts on it, so thanks for sharing these thoughts.
Steve :-/Steve :-/

Is there any Roadmap for getting the Boards off lithium and onto the Force.com Platform and Answers Community?

bob_buzzardbob_buzzard

@stevemo - I'm not convinced that the question and answer format is necessarily the right one for a lot of the posts on these boards.  Much like stack exchange, they don't really support the discussion side of things. 

Steve :-/Steve :-/

Really? How is the discussion in this format -> 

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/answers

 

any different from the discussions this? ->

http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Formulas-Validation-Rules/bd-p/custom_formula

 

Does the "question and answer format" on the Answers Community really differ from the format used on the lithium Formula and Validation Rule boards other than the semantics of "Questions and Answers"  vs. "Message and Reply"?  

 

At least half the traffic on the Answers Community is driven by questions related to Formulas, Validation Rules, Workflows, Reports, etc.  The DevForce Formula and VR board is getting maybe 5-10 new questions (on a busy day) I get that many questions on the Answers Community before I'm halfway through my first cup of coffee. 

 

It just seems like for whatever reason nobody wants to take the DevForce Formulas and VR Board out behind the barn and give it "The Old Yeller".  So we're left with this split of duplicate communities, duplicate boards, duplicate profiles, etc...  I've even seen people log into BOTH communities and post the exact same question.   A question is posted/solved in one community and people with the same problem in the other community are completely unaware that a solution has been posted, unless they log in and search in BOTH communties.  I mean how is that efficient?

->

http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Formulas-Validation-Rules/Roll-Up-Summary-Fields-for-Product-Line/td-p/569399

 

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/questionDetail?qId=a1X30000000f2MVEAY

 

 

http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Formulas-Validation-Rules/formula-field-with-nested-If-to-get-multi-pick-list-values-just/td-p/570065

 

https://sites.secure.force.com/success/questionDetail?qId=a1X30000000fArOEAU

 

 

 

bob_buzzardbob_buzzard

There's no difference in terms of the presentation, but the Answers site is geared up for a single Question and number of Answers format.  On the discussion boards, often the question isn't apparent until you get several posts or even pages through the discussion.

 

In terms of the specific boards that you are referring to, the Answers may well be a good fit.  However, I don't think there's a good case for moving the Apex and Visualforce boards to the Answers site, in the same way that I don't think they should be replaced by Stack Exchange, as a lot of the time a lengthy discussion is required rather than the user knowing the correct question to ask.

Steve :-/Steve :-/

I must be missing something because I don't see that when I'm on either Formula VR board or the Answers Community.  On either site most people state their problem/question up front in the subject line and the body of the initial post, and it's either answered/solved in the first reply, or there's a some follow-up discussion before a solution is reached.  

 

Again let me be clear that I'm talking about the Formulas and Validation Rules discussion board, not the Cookbooks, Code Share, Blogs, Tech Library.  If anything I wish that the Answers Community would adopt some of them instead of going off the reservation with their own content. 

 

It seems like ever since Answers/Community was launched there's been this split, but some things have been left behind, and there are these loose ends that nobody has ever gotten around to tying up (I mean c'mon it's been over 2 YEARS!) has Chatter sucked up so many resources at SFDC they can't finish this?   Then again, I know first hand they're not exactly proactive when it comes to anything related to merging and clean-up -> https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000BriGAAS 

Steve :-/Steve :-/

Then again it's only been 3 years since I first brought it up, so what's the rush -> 

http://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000BtZ1

bob_buzzardbob_buzzard

Ah - okay, I was taking issue with your first couple of posts, which just referred to 'the boards'.

 

I agree WRT the F&VR board - it wouldn't even occur to me to look here as all the history and experts are on the Answers site.  Boards do get shut down here (New to Cloud Development, for example, which merged into the General Development I believe), so now that April is looking after the boards you never know your luck.

 

Interestingly, there's a discussion on Stack Exchange meta about how to get more admins onto the site and away from Answers!  I've pointed out that it needs to be offering something different - the same type of service with a tiny fraction of the users, history and experts isn't going to appeal to anyone.

Steve :-/Steve :-/

No worries Bob,

 

Yeah, the StackEchange guys reached out to me a while back when they were getting started.  I was like "Just what I need... another community, with another profile, with another set of content, etc..."

 

#NoThanks  

 

I dunno what the idea/need is behind The StackExchange Area51 site.  I mean was there really any gap (either real or perceived) that was not already being served between the overlapping DevForce/Answers communities? 

 

 

Steve :-/Steve :-/

So there's a Top Kudoed Authors  Top Kudoed Posts and Top Kudo Givers. and nothing for Solutions Authored?  :-/

bob_buzzardbob_buzzard

Whether stack exchange filled a gap is debatable.  The gamification side of things is good and the site is popular with the intermediate/advanced developer. The experience for those new to Salesforce isn't great though - if a question or answer isn't deemed to be good enough it quickly gets downvoted and closed - which doesn't seem to be very community minded to me.

 

There's also a cynical side of me that feels some people are keen to move to a new site where they don't have to catch up to the reputation of those who have been participating for years.

Steve :-/Steve :-/

LOL!  I think I may have contracted the same case of "Cynicism" that you've got.

Abhijeet Kumar 1Abhijeet Kumar 1
Is there any way to post a new question here??