Has the learning stopped?

Off-Topic Discussions
43

I don’t believe I can add much to the conversation that hasn’t already been said.

I’m sure there are others outside this thread, but the individuals in the conversation so far, I would commend for their engagement in supporting the community and quality of discussion and answers around the forums, I’ve learned tidbits here and there and generally take joy in reading their posts.

Just as I’ve observed @redlynx82 for being, I too am an avid fan of the Stack Exchange network in particular Stackoverflow among a few other communities on the network.

I’m generally pro ‘do whatever builds up the community’, and reputation metrics of sorts doesn’t suede me to not attempt to provide a quality solution that helps the OP and future readers to learn. As an example, here I provided another answer to a question that had already been answered as I felt it added additional context, not because the OP needed it, but because after search the UiPath forums and Stackoverflow I didn’t find anything that adequately explained special keystrokes in one place, as such I felt it would help future readers.

That said, it is a little draining to keep coming up against the same situations repeatedly such as…

1] Answer the same questions over and over again cough AWS cough, or 2] those hit and run questions where you put in the time to answer the question, but receive no feedback either way if the community was able to help out.

My personal favourite is the 3] thread highjacking or necromancy, sometimes both!

And let’s not forget the 4] individuals which post on multiple threads looking for an active user that might respond to them in real-time.

Like many others, I’ll be helpful and polite and in answering the question I’ll ask the user to maybe post a new topic and DM me the link in the case of thread highjacking or necromancy, or might refer them to the guidelines here on UiPath or Stack Exchange / Stackoverflow to help them provide a MVCE question to help them to be more appealing to the community to provide answers.

In comparing the two (UiPath and Stackoverflow) you’ll notice a lot of similarities if looking at the UiPath related topics/questions, more so than comparing the great Stackoverflow platform because the larger community there hasn’t built up around UiPath so you tend to not see the same level of moderation from the community as you might on other topics.

One big thing that I think Stack Exchange has over Discourse is the granularity of ‘trust levels’/feature privilege and the ability for the community at large to help govern the community itself.

I find the Discourse to be rather difficult to say go from Trust Level 2 to Trust Level 3, and anything beyond that is a manual promotion, but the level of functionality given by each trust level to not entirely be worthwhile. For myself, I’d love to be able to re-categorize/tag or rename a topic if it would bring clarity to the post or put it into an area of the forums that would most likely get it the appropriate attention. (e.g when an unrelated topic is posted in the UiPath Jobs area)

In comparison the granularity of privileges to reputation points with Stack Exchange allows the community to protect itself in a way and to encourage to help the community a little bit at a time as the user grows into it. As an example early on (15pts) you can vote other questions or answers up, but you can’t vote down until later one (125pts). But the reputation system is easy to climb if you participate, for example, I have 2118 pts, which isn’t much but grants me most of the features in their list, and more than I need for how active I am in the community. And almost half of that comes from a single answer I posted 7 years ago that was marked as a solution to a particular question and slowly received ‘upvotes’ over time.

I think all this is to say, we can’t force a user to do x, y, or z but we can guide them in a friendly and encouraging way, it’s up to each of us (as this thread shows) to move in the direction we would like to see. I think we have the user base and the drive to build a better community, but we need the support, tooling, and guidelines to allow us to do so.

P.s. I wouldn’t be heartbroken if we were able to leverage the Stack Exchange platform and integrate it with the other UiPath sites as a more formal Q&A resource and use the UiPath forums for more in-depth discussions. (in a similar way that commenting back and forth on a Q or A on Stack Exchange will prompt the system to ask you to take it to a chatroom).

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