Asking questions (beta)

[VeselinaPeykova]

1. Question title:

Is it possible to show number of characters remaining when entering the question title? Currently if you attempt to create a question with a really long title or with a too short one, you can see the error only after you try to submit the question.

In my opinion the title maximum length can be reduced a bit more if the idea is to prevent people from pasting the whole question in the subject - 28 words for a title is probably too generous. https://answers.sap.com/questions/18273/test-length-of-title-lorem-ipsum-dolor-sit-amet-co.html

2. Revisions:

If nothing was changed in the content, is it necessary to create a new revision? At the moment it seems possible to spam revisions and notify followers with each new one.  Will there be a limit on revisions per post?

3.Closing a question:

It is possible to change the answered status or choose a different best answer of a closed question created by me and closed by me (reason The question is answered, right answer was accepted) - is this the intended behavior?

4. Sorting replies:

It can be useful to have an option for sorting by the highest rated in descending order to give a chance to higher-quality replies to appear close to the top if the accepted answer by the OP is not a very good one (if I understood correctly, sorting by votes is meant to measure the activity- up-votes+down-votes, but not the quality of the answer).

[tamira · Accepted solution]

Hey,

1: Thanks for the feedback, I'll check what we can do about showing the characters left. The max length is currently 255, do you have a recommendation about what would be the optimal number?

2: I don't think there will/should be a limitation on how many times you can edit your content. However, turning off notifications for "minor edits" is on the radar.

3: It can always happen that there is a better answer. Once the question is closed no new answers can be added.

4: Sorting by votes is the default which always has the best answer (accepted answer) on the top, then the one with the highest vote sum (assumption is that the higher the vote sum, the higher is the quality). Sorting by old/new will be changed and be in strict chronological order, instead of having the accepted answer on the top.

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

to 1) not more than 100 characters. These would be 2 lines in the communication stream of the current SCN, far enough to post a meaningful subject (headline in a newspaper), much to much people posting the entire question in the subject, hoping even for more attention having 4 lines of subject (as it is 74 times more than others have)

[tamira · Accepted solution]

Thanks Jürgen, you are as fast as lightning

[Colleen · Accepted solution]

Jurgen

I had same thoughts put would even consider getting down to 50 to prevent users form posting entire content in subject line (wonder what it looks like on mobile with mobile-first approach)?

I already suggested tips to move Ask your Question here to the question contents and leave the title as a subject line. Therefore, subject line doesn't actually need to be a question

Regards

Colleen

[VeselinaPeykova · Accepted solution]

1. Yes, 100 characters should suffice for a good subject, even for German speakers.

By the way, with the new platform without spaces we will get questions in multiple languages with the same primary tag, is this correct? Or there will be also dedicated tags for Portuguese/Spanish/Chinese?

Edit - I saw the document explaining language tags, so I guess this will be some sort of secondary tag, which means filtering by it will be important for non-English speakers. I wonder if this will be related to the languages we set in the profile (because using system locale is not a good criteria).

2. It would be a nice touch to have such option as a profile setting, but it is not critical - you can simply un-follow the person.

3. Now I see -  closing a discussion prevents adding answers (comments still possible) - like a mix of partially locking a discussion and answered/assumed answered status available to users. Thank you for clarifying.

So the idea is that if the OP closes the discussion, it will discourage Karma credit hunters from posting there, because - no benefit. There can be cases when the question gets closed with solved myself and not providing the solution and some desperate soul asking later how did you solve it, which will resurrect it briefly with less chances of getting replies, but all this can be a good thing.

4. Does highest vote sum mean total number of votes or highest rating value for the answer (after the accepted as best by the OP)? E.g. answer A with 5 down-votes and 1 up-vote  versus answer B with 3 up-votes, 0 down-votes - which will be shown first?

Message was edited by: Veselina Peykova

[moshenaveh · Accepted solution]

Let's ping once again:)

[tamira · Accepted solution]

1: Cool, thanks for the feedback! Yes, there will be dedicated tags for supported languages, that would be defaultly set to English and if the person wants to write in a different language, they can select another one from the dropdown.

I agree, filtering will be important. There are various ideas about what to base it on.

E.g. if you check SAP.com today, there is a country selector on the top menu, that shows you the page in a localized language (which usually means the language of the country + English, after asking the respective countries). This is not purely SCN related, but good to know.

2: So one option is to base the filtering on that country selector and then there is what you brought up about your languages that you set in your profile. One more thing to highlight is that not every language will be supported by the Community, we would work with apprx. the same languages that we support today on SCN.

3: Exactly. There is really no benefit in Karma Credit hunting anyway (and you don't get credits just for posting something), since there are no leaderboards and only you see your own credits, so you can't compete with anyone.

Of course, ideally, if you solve the question yourself, it would be nice if you could share a few thoughts about how you did that

4:

vote sum example1: if there is 1 upvote and 1 downvote on an answer then: +1-1=0 so the sum is 0.

vote sum example2: if there is 1 upvote and 2 downvotes on an answer then: +1-1-1=-1 so the sum is -1.

So it is not the count of the amount of votes, but their value. So for the example you brought up: A=-5+1=-4

and

B=+3-0=+3

Since +3 is more than -4, answer B would be ranked higher if the sorting is set to votes.

[moshenaveh · Accepted solution]

Hello Veselina,

We also listed your feedback in our feedback list->http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-62882 where you can keep track of its status.

Thanks a lot,

Moshe

[moshenaveh]

Let's ping