Jazz Community Site - Jazz Team Blog » Using the jazz.net forum more effectively

Millard Ellingsworth

Wed, 30 Jan 2013

6 min read

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Last year we made a big move with our jazz.net forums, moving from an older, thread-based, hierarchical model to a question and answer tag-based one. People acclimated to the new approach pretty quickly — plenty of questions still got asked and answered. Now that we’re past the early adoption, I’d like your help taking it to the next level. As we work to expand our community support initiatives to get you better and faster answers, I want to take a moment to explain how you can help make the forums a better experience for everyone (including yourself).

Accept Answers

Many posters get complete and useful answers to their questions. Many of them are kind enough to write a thank you comment. Please use the Mark this answer as the accepted answer link as your thank you. This rewards the responder and generally only the person that asked the question is allowed to mark the accepted answer.

Link for marking an answer as accepted

Why? In an attempt to provide answers as quickly as possible, we monitor feeds for unanswered and unresolved questions. The unresolved questions have an answer but the poster has not marked it as accepted (so it appears to still need attention). This means the community spends time looking over questions that don’t really need attention — and everyone would prefer we spend that time on really unresolved questions. Accepting answers means the community can focus on ones that really do still need an answer. And the responder gets some well-deserved reputation points.

Comment whenever you are not answering

Along the same lines, if you don’t understand a question or want to ask the poster for some more information, use the Comment feature rather than putting your questions in an answer.

Link for commenting instead of answering

I know that big text box is very inviting, but as you may have already figured out, the question will now be marked as answered. That may keep it from getting attention as quickly as it might – which wasn’t at all what you were trying to accomplish.

Similarly, you can add comments to an answer if you would like to get (or provide) additional details. Don’t start a new answer if adding some clarification to an existing one is better. If a new question arises, don’t bury it in the comments (where it might not get found nor answered), start a new post with it.

Edit rather than amend

If you have provided an answer (or a comment or a question) and realize that you can improve it, you don’t need to start a new one or add a comment. Just fix it. All items have an edit link (either the word “edit” or a small pencil icon). This will keep it easier to read than trying to maintain context across multiple answers or comments. The item will be marked as edited by you (which is fine because that’s what happened).

Vote!

If you read a question that you’ve been meaning to ask or are happy to know the answer to, vote for it. If you read an answer and think “Good answer. She really took the time to research that and even included a code snippet,” vote for it. These people helped you and everyone else in the community, give them a little love – it’s just a mouse click, you don’t have to write a note or anything.

Sample voting links

Research with search

We all want our questions answered as quickly as possible. An answer right now would be awesome. Many of the products covered in our forum have been around a while and are used by many people around the world. There’s a reasonable chance someone has “read your mind” and already asked your question (and someone else has already answered). Rather than wait for an answer, just go get it using search.

Why? When we answer questions, one of the first things we do is search for similar questions with answers. If we find one that seems to match the one you asked, we’ll answer your question with something like “This question seems to be similar [link to post].” Someone can do that search for you, but that will just slow you down and take time away from them answering new questions.

We are working on a more complete “Usage Guide” version of this material with additional details on searching options, RSS feeds and other useful topics. We’ll post here and in the forum when it’s ready.

Provide details

When asking questions, imagine what information the responder might find helpful and include it. This should get you an answer faster (and it will help you attract responders — everyone prefers something they can actually work on rather than ask clarification about and need to return to later). Include version numbers, the text of any error messages, the text (when available) of the “Why did this happen?” in the Team Adviser, etc.

Thank you for being part of our community!

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18 Comments

Guido Schneider February 4, 2013 @ 12:03 pm

Hello Millard,
Thank you for this post.

I’m using the forum quite excessivly. It belongs to my daily job to be there.
Some suggestion for enhancements:
– I would like to have a preview mode, before you save your Question/Answer/Comment. It’s often the case, you get rendering issues (depending on browser) or you see a typo or a small change just after the save. So a pre-save or preview would be helpful.
– The query box is about thre to four centimeters long. This bos should be larger. It would also be good to have a small help button with the most usefull query syntax.
– Earning reputation points it’s quite nice. It’s a small game for fun. But for end customer it’s quite impossible to become one of the top rated forum members because the users list is not separated between IBM developers and customers.
– The comment box is often to short so you have to create a new asnwer instead just to comment/enhance an already correct answer.
– Often I answer my question by myself, because I have found out the solution. But I’m not able to accept this as the valid answer. How should we proceed in such situation? Maybe there could be a button, to ask the moderator to check and maybe accept this own answer.

regards
Guido
Millard Ellingsworth February 4, 2013 @ 2:08 pm

Hi, Guido, thanks for the comments! If there are not existing work items for these already, I will make some new ones. Would you like to be subscribed? I have already been in discussions with the team about the reputation points. I think it is important to identify/reward people who are actively working to make our community a better place. Accepting your own answer is on my short-list, too. I’d like to see an Advanced Search page where you can have a more full-featured search box and construct and test queries, then easily turn them into RSS feeds. I wouldn’t mind seeing the regular search box stretched across the top of the screen rather than crunched into the side-bar. Maybe even put it in the large white space above the main panel (just thinking off the cuff here, not sure what I can get the team to go along with).

Thanks again for taking the time to comment…Millard
Guido Schneider February 5, 2013 @ 1:52 pm

Yes please subscribe me to any WI you create for this ideas.
regards
Guido
Ralph Schoon February 8, 2013 @ 7:25 am

Hi Millard,

thank you so much for this post.

Just one thing: I ran into issues with commenting several times. My comment was too long for instance. I had trouble to format my comments in the beginning and I have seen issues with using
```
 for code recently. I ended up having to answer with an answer some times because of such reasons.

However, I noticed you can make it an answer as a work around and change it to a comment afterwards.
```
Ralph Schoon February 8, 2013 @ 7:26 am

oops, shouldn’t have added that tag in there…
Ralph Schoon February 8, 2013 @ 7:26 am

The trouble I has was with using the [pre] html tag.
Ajay Wilson February 22, 2013 @ 7:17 am

Thanks for the information.
Andrew Codrington March 21, 2013 @ 11:26 am

I like the direction you’re going with the forums.

Areas I think could be improved:

1. Search speed – Wow it can be slow. I just did a search for a phase and counted 25 steamboats while watching the spinning circle of wait. I often find myself going to google instead with “site:jazz.net”

2. Search with tags – Focusing search with tags is cool, but do I really need to type them in by hand? [rational-team-concert] is a lot of characters, with a lot of room for typos.

3. Search by date (if not version) – It’s so discouraging to wait out the 25 steamboats and see what looks like a relevant thread, only to find the answer was applicable to Jazz 1.0.

4. Feed content – With the old forums I subscribed to a feed which showed the new content in a thread as the entry. Now the feed I’m subscribed to only shows the original post (“question”). If someone provides an answer or comment the original question reappears in my feed, but I don’t see the new content. I know something has happened, but I have to go to jazz.net to see what. You guys aren’t looking at ad revenue from jazz.net are you? :-)
I may just not have looked hard enough for the correct feed and this may be moot with Google Reader shutting down soon.
Millard Ellingsworth March 21, 2013 @ 11:46 am

@acodring All great points, thanks for taking the time to add to the conversation. I will admit to using Google and “site:jazz.net” from time to time — did you know you can also add a date range, like, “2010..2013” onto that to restrict date ranges? That won’t help if someone asked a question about v1.0 in 2010, but it should weed out the older questions. Search and search performance are on the list of things we’re working to make improvements on. We’ve done a hasty prototype of how to add an indication of what the last activity was to an item so you can tell if it was just an upvote or retag and skim past it. I’ll do my best to see that this information gets into the feed content as well.
Khanh Nguyen Duy April 15, 2013 @ 3:06 am

thanks for share!!!
Homer Pope April 19, 2013 @ 9:52 am

Millard,
Are there plans to move other products to this type of interaction, such as RFT? It can get frustrating having to open up a PMR for something that can be answered in a forum.
Thanks!
Millard Ellingsworth May 2, 2013 @ 10:53 am

@homerpope I hope so, but I can’t promise anything. It should be part of moving to be a more social business — which is why I hope it will happen. The best part of the forum approach is that another RFT user who has already solved an issue may reply, even faster than IBM might, keeping you moving forward. Thanks for the question and I will use it to see if we can move this forward.
Frank Schophuizen December 20, 2013 @ 1:26 pm

Answering my own question cannot be marked as “aanswered”for your own answer. How to mark it as answered?
Millard Ellingsworth December 20, 2013 @ 1:42 pm

@Frank, yeah, sorry about that. I guess the forum software doesn’t want you gaming the reputation points by answering/upvoting your own stuff. If you want it closed or marked as answered, email me a link to millarde via us.ibm.com
Denis Maliarevich March 12, 2014 @ 7:51 am

But I don’t see the “comment” feature on jazz.net/forum, what’s wrong with me? I’m logged in
Millard Ellingsworth March 12, 2014 @ 9:16 am

@Denis Similar to the screenshot in the post, there is a link at the bottom of each entry (question or answer) that says “Comment on this…”. It does seem to only appear if you are logged in, but if you are logged in, it’s odd that you don’t see them. Did you refresh the page after logging in? Perhaps the page display didn’t update after you logged in? If you continue to have issues, please email me.
Denis Maliarevich March 12, 2014 @ 9:47 am

@Millard I’ve checked once again: for some questions in the forum I do see “Comment on this…” but for some others I don’t. A bit strange thing..
Millard Ellingsworth March 12, 2014 @ 9:55 am

Can you email me links for some of the ones that don’t have it? I will investigate. millarde via us.ibm.com

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