Forum redesign: Categories and tags - please throw your feedback at us

Hi @loginerror
Good idea to make it more clean.
For the uservoice category i would suggest have a planned category where only moderators can forward posts to from user voices. This way we get a clear view of planned ideas (where we can respond onto) without having users pollute it with bad or double ideas.

5 Likes

It would be good to be able to create tags and mark low quality posts for deletion for the users that can already change titles/topics/tags. I myself have moved around posts to the appropriate topic, but I was not able to create tags.

3 Likes

We had this setting allowing everyone to create tags, but we removed it a couple of month ago. The reason is that there are way too many tags and people get confused, ending up misusing them.

But I’m glad you brought up this discussion, Ciprian, because Categories redesign goes hand in hand with a better use of tags. I’ve read on Discourse forum that Categories are like walls. If you have 4, you get a nice house. If you have too many, it becomes a maze. And I believe right now we have a maze.

So i was thinking of cleaning tags and establishing some “standards”. For example, when we refer to an issue, how should we tag it? issue / bug / error / problem etc? Should we have a tag for each activity pack?

5 Likes

This is a good idea, to have some sort of roadmap. Thanks, Mike!

5 Likes

We are in the research phase and this is was actually step 0: checking how others are doing, best practices for forums. But we need your help to adapt these to our Forum. :slight_smile:

Word! Thanks, Nathan!

7 Likes

I believe this is a great idea to begin with, @loginerror.
Specially for new users that want to get involved with the community.
I was just checking StackOverflow tags and there is around 50K tags which have been created and moderated by users, but for UiPath community where there is a, relatively, small amount of users yet is better to keep things simple, probably in the future as the community keeps growing it will be a good idea to allow the tags creation again.
For the categories I know is going to be a lot easier for everyone to post.

I think overall these are great changes to keep things clear and simple. And I think is a good step 0. I think the next step is to tackle down the issue that @c.ciprian was mentioning about those low quality posts which are so easily found in the forum, and also encourage people to use the standard to post high quality questions here and avoid Slack channels misuse.

8 Likes

I definitely agree with this idea. Sometimes I spot posts not making much sense, without any details etc. It shows little respect to forum contributors.

Cheers

5 Likes

@c.ciprian @Luisfemm @J0ska

Thank you so much for pushing this idea. Personally, I think it will be tricky to do with such a young community. At the end of the day, we want everybody to feel welcomed.

We will definitely need to improve in this regard though, kind of in line with this quote, which was already pointed out by @ovi:

I suppose we will have to meet somewhere inbetween of what we have now and Stack Exchange :sweat_smile:

6 Likes

I think that for issues we should be more organized

bugs

  • ask for clear elements when describing a bug
  • add workaround, if available, and add the version in which the bug is corrected
  • do not allow off-topic

Errors / Mistakes

  • check if it’s not actually a bug
  • add correct tag to indicate an error related to x domain (just let anyone to create tags here)
  • periodically go through the errors grouped by particular tag (or similar) and update a Common Mistakes locked and pinned post
  • delete the errors that are described in the Common Mistakes post
8 Likes

Good Move @loginerror

Thanks

2 Likes

Sometimes less is more :slight_smile: it should help people navigate quicker to what the area that are looking for! I notice often that people raise questions / topics that are in the completely wrong category so this should rectify some of that :smile:

Great work!!

Something else that I have seen work is ‘Working Groups’ - people can assign themselves to certain groups i.e. expertise, then rather then tagging individual users for help, you can tag the group of users.

7 Likes

This is awesome and very welcome! I am curious with the use of tags how do see the different use cases for “RPA Dev Rookies” and “RPA Dev Advanced”? Are they locked down in any fashion e.g. Based on Training complete/Badges?

I’m curious as in the current state I see a mix of what I would consider Rookie or Advanced topics being posted in either Category (or other Categories for that matter!)

I think the idea of community assisted tag creation is awesome as well. It would lend a hand to discuss the creation of new tags if someone feels that it is warranted (enough questions for a particular sub-topic for example) and hopefully(?) allow these individuals to re-tag a post if it doesn’t match the topic or if a particular set of tags might be better suited.

Would the the sub-category be needed here? Or would it be possible to lock down certain tags… “In Review”, “In Development”, “Planned”, etc. I don’t think another category or tags for the matter are going to prevent duplicate ideas. Educating users to search before posting, maybe paired with showing them similar posts/ideas before submitted might have a better chance of combating that issue.

It would be neat if we could extend this idea to be able to

  • Flag possible duplicates, Needs more details
  • be able to vote up/down both questions and responses/answers/solutions to highlight good ones from the poor ones.
    Not so much to discourage anyone from contributing, but to encourage users to post thought out questions with details or highlight good solutions to the OP’s topic (Often I see the OP marking their own response as the solution when all it is is “Yes I solved it”, meanwhile the actual solution is five posts higher up in the thread.

I’m happy to lean a little more to the right towards Stack Exchange! :tada:

Is it possible to have a separation between Questions / Answers/Solutions and Discussion in how the Topics are defined? It would be handy to highlight Questions/Answer in such a way like the Stack Exchange network, allowing a different approach to how individuals solve a particular problem (Pair that with Voting, and the most popular/helpful ones will filter up) and then you could have the discussion side independent (Or related to a Q&A post) to keep the chatter and more in-depth conversation from hiding the Solutions.

Definitely excited to see how the community evolves!

1 Like

Good to see some changes being done @loginerror
Some Suggestions from my end

  1. A Catergory called Experimental/Innovation where users can discuss ideas for something they wish to try are trying or need help with.

Example : Computer Vision, AI based approaches that solve complex problems/unique cases

2.Hall of Fame

To recognise and encourage people who support UiPath in various areas (forums, events ,social media)

Also Can we do somethign to combine Ask in your language in RPA Rookies and RPA Advanced?
for example a person who has his language set as english sees only those topics in these catergories While if someone has Korean or some other language selected as default they would only see those

and finally if some one wishes to see in all languages all topics they can select all

A nice example of tag usage is under the Release category. There you have first a component tag (such as studio, orchestrator, robot, activities, etc) and then a description of the topic, using just 5 secondary tags: bug, suggestions, how-to, error, general-inquiry
We are currently leaning towards disabling tag creation initially, while having a set of clear primary (component) and secondary (type of question) tags. Naturally, there could be more tags per topic, but having a solid structure of the first two like that would allow users to easy categorize their topics and us to easiy go through them when needed (i.e. what are the current issues with Orchestrator).

I agree, there is indeed an option to make specific tags staff only, which would work here just fine.

Definitely a tricky one with what we have available out of the box. However, ensuring that quality answers resurface makes for an overall better user experience. We’ll have to give it more thought in later stages of the redesign.
Currently, for longer topics it is possible to summarize them, which leaves you with a thread with most relevant comments (see example here, I am actually not sure what is the algorithm behind it thought).

As to us becoming Stack Exchange :smiley: I think we will try to keep our original identity while simply improving the experience. Restructuring how the replies in a topic work might not be doable, but making it so it’s easier to spot the most valuable answers should be.

No, this is wrong. There are quite a lot of users that, for the sake of fame, reply to all topics, hurry to post xaml solutions instead of guiding the poster, etc, etc…

3 Likes

I Don’t think it is wrong to motivate others to contribute to UiPath. Recognition goes a long way to inspire others to be a role model and be a contributer in some way. Sure it doesn’t have to cover every kind of recognition. It needs to be about the big ones, people who made some very significant contributions

Like someone who has a 1000 solutions or someone who has won hackthons organised by Uipath; things like that

Thank you for even more ideas!

I think we don’t really need a Hall of Fame with the constantly improved Connect that does this thing for us :slight_smile:

As to the moderation efforts, we are already thinking how to involve some of you guys in maintaining our new structure.

4 Likes

This is a great thought. Please remember that myself , @Jan_Brian_Despi @lakshman are here anytime to support on your initiatives… so we could join hands with you guys when required… :slight_smile:

5 Likes

@loginerror I noticed users are able to mark their own posts as solutions which seems abit counter intuitive? Not sure what your or others view on this one is.

2 Likes

I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong with this if their reply contains the solution to the OP; however, I have seen people mark there reply that might imply some sort of “Resolved” or “Thank you” as the solution rather than the post that actually provides the solution.

3 Likes