Do we really need a t-shirt??

[Former Member]

Hi Everyone,

I was reading all these threads about stuff like point hunters, people not allocating points and people not searching the forum before posting their questions. What i get from these is that people are doing this stuff only for a t-shirt and not for the love of participating in SDN. So moderators why dont you just change the way you give out t-shirts. I mean instead of having a mile-stone to judge people, judge them by the quality of answers they give. I am not an expert in SAP, so I try to read a lot in these forums in order to learn and answer some questions when i think i know of the answer. But people(whose names I don't want to divulge) are becoming the Top Contributors just by copying and pasting whats already there in the forum.

There will always be a junk of useless questions for which you can find answers just by searching in any forum. But I think people should not reply to these questions just because they can earn some easy points. Maybe not answering their questions can make people to search first before posting.

Any thoughts welcome.

Regards

Aneesh.

[Former Member]

Thanks Everyone. That was really a nice discussion..

[Former Member]

Yepp,

I do agree. The signal to noise ratio in this 'Expert Forums' should be improved.

But how? I have observed that about sixty percent of the question can be answered

with RTFM or 'Use the search button'. But does not seem to be appropriate for

our SAP forum. We are not dealing with geeks or developers, we are talking to

our customers, I have a bad feeling to be too rude to them.

In order to increase the quality of the contributions in the forum where I am active,

we create some howtos and FAQs using Wiki articles. A lot of questions can be

answered simply by posting a link to them. This helps, I feel that the noise does

decrease.

I reply to questions, like 'Where can I find the documentation?' with a detailed

description of 'How to use the Search field'. You know, that one in the upper left

corner...

One of my favourite reply is: 'I found really useful information in the thread

>>Please read this before you start a topic<<'

Most of the point hunter's answers are ****, I started to praise such answers

in order to show the ridiculousness of those postings.

I hope that talking to them like a parent to a child may post such stupid stuff

painful to the authors. Will see whether it helps

Regards

Tobias

[Former Member]

Tobias,

while I agree with most what you say, IMHO a small part of your statement is a misconception(often also found with community participants working for SAP):

Here, primarily we do not 'deal' with customers but we communicate/collaborate with fellow community members. For an 'official' dealing with customers there are help lines, service contracts, whatever.

If latter is accepted, 'only' standard social rules apply. This means as well that

- not every statement of an individual is an official company statement of his/her company

- there's no warranty (in a strict sense) for the correctness of each contribution

- there's no obligation to the community to respond to a request in a certain time or respond at all

To me this makes the difference between a mere sales channel or just another help-line and a real community.

My 2 cents,

anton

[Former Member]

Hello Anton,

my full agreement. But that's always the same: Even as a private person I

am a loyal employee of my company. This includes a correct and kind

behavior when talking to SAP users I meet on parties or private events.

Do we have to learn how to participate correctly in news groups and in a forum?

Surely I saw the difference between this forum and the news groups I joined in the

past. Nobody risked to post a question which had been answered in a FAQ already.

Since we do not have a kill file in our forum the community must educate its members.

The question is: How to educate the members? I see the risk of loosing lots of honest

contributors.

regards

Tobias

Message was edited by:

Tobias Gomer

I forgot to ask: Would you please reward points for this

useful answer

[Former Member]

Hi Tobias,

>>How to educate the members? I see the risk of loosing lots of honest

>>contributors.

For all the questions being posted which can always be solved by using the search option, I am still answering them. But in the end of my answer I am adding "~~The best practice is to search the forum before posting a thread" . Maybe we should just try to educate people to use the search option more and hopefully after a point of time the noise reduces.

Regards

Aneesh.

[Former Member]

So considering the topic of this thread, we could answer with yes

... we need a shirt for all who use the search function before posting a new thread:

<b>I've searched on SDN !!!</b>

or something like that

I bet, if you offer shirts everyone will use the search function like hell.

Hmmm,

but maybe the questions like:

"Yesterday I used the search function the 10th time, so when will my shirt arrive finally?"

will come up to often then.

Cheers,

Sascha

[Former Member]

I just checked this out:

http://www.intelligroup.com/

On top they have an advertising:

"A leader on SDN."

Thats what I was talking about some posts above.

I do not mean that all intelligroup posters are point hunters, but company seems

to be hasppy if they earn a lot of points and belong to the top of the company list here.

Cheers,

Sascha

[former_member583013]

Hi Sascha:

I just look at the web page you posted....That's sad to me...They're using SDN as a way to promote themselfs....

I think that there's no problem when one individual do that...But a company? That's not good to me....

Greetings,

Blag.

[Former Member]

Does this mean, they are hard-working and competent contributors?

Does anybody know who of our community fellows are related to

Intelligroup?

regards

Tobias

[Former Member]

Hi Tobias.

I do not know it and I would never judge this ...

They have about 226000 points so far and i appreciate their effort and work for our community.

It was just a suggestion that some companyies could force their employess to contribute to raise the position in the top companies list and that this is the reason why point hunting is such a topic arround here.

And just some time later I found out that they do this advertising on their homepage ...

Just meant as food for thought .... I am not sure whether I like the top company list ... not just because of the above statement but also cause every one can get my email adress with a bit effort ...

[Former Member]

There are two (sorry for getting all official on everyone) companies that are up there in the top but not because they implemented some "forced" program but rather they implemented a quality program.

Both Intelligroup and Wipro have contacted us, given us a central contact person for all problems related to their users and shared their processes on how they encourage contribution and work hard to ensure proper behaviour and contribution and if that's the "price" to pay for them saying "#1 on SDN" I'll be happy to agree with them.

Remember in the end it's still the individual if people leave their points go with them so if a group, organization or company can help us ensure quality and their employees who use the email associated with them are OK with it then I can't complain much

[Former Member]

Hi Craig.

Thanks for bringing light on this.

Cheers,

Sascha

[pokrakam]

Hmmm... I have to side with Sascha here about the top companies list. To me 'community' and 'company' concepts should be kept separate. Community is social and company is commercial. A professional group/forum is supposed to be a neutral ground where we aren't grouped by or acting on behalf of our company. I am a member of a few professional associations/lists (some paid for) and SDN is the only one that has a company spotlight and I have to admit I don't like it.

[Former Member]

Often times those that don't have this have something else (massive black lists, ban lists, etc.) we don't and one reason why is because we reach out to the companies and ask for their support. It's their people in here and those who want to show their company by using their company ID we allow it's no different that saying what network you are in or group inside of Facebook or anywhere else.

The point is by us reaching out to those companies we help to ensure good quality. This is something tested and it works we just wish we had more companies willing to put the effort into doing the same as the two I mentioned. Everyone benefits and as a result everyone gets better content.

[former_member583013]

Craig:

Hate to say this....But to me, a company using a "We are # 1 on SDN" banner is a bad a those guys writting "I got 10K points on SDN" on their resumes...

In mine a got a link to my blogger space....But just because it can be used to show my knowledge....But I would never say...."Hey...I got almost 5K points on SDN....or....I'm number # 1 in Latin America on SDN"...

Being a Community, SDN can't be use a way to attract job offers....Also because points hunters earn thousand of points but they really haven't prove that they know something....they just repeat others answers...put millions of links....or copy help.sap.com word by word...

Just my thoughts.... -:)

Greetings,

Blag.

[KKilhavn]

> We are not dealing with geeks or developers, we are talking to our customers,

> I have a bad feeling to be too rude to them.

Then leave it to the rest of us, there are some of us that are not SAP employees too

Just don't give us too much of a hard time for doing it, unless we get out of line which of course will happen once in a while.

> In order to increase the quality of the contributions in the forum where I am active,

> we create some howtos and FAQs using Wiki articles. A lot of questions can be

> answered simply by posting a link to them. This helps, I feel that the noise does

> decrease.

So, <u>when</u> the service.sap.com solution has been copied to SDN, it should be modified to provide a link to the FAQ in addition to the search results. That means there must be one main FAQ page for each forum.

I am starting to look forward to the change already

[KKilhavn]

Well, I kind of like seeing kilhavn.no (my employer is IBM, used to be Statoil) in the top companies list (quite a few pages down, but still...). As CEO, CIO, CFO and lifetime dictator of the company in control of the domain name I support the effort made

[jasper_blok]

Kjetil,

Check the Sap Netweaver Platform list for top companies (30 days), you got the nr 1 spot =).

Cya,

Jasper

[KKilhavn]

He-hey! The CIO will consider awarding his favourite employee with a two-week holiday for this achievement

But how is that possible when I don't even top any of the individual forums? Something fishy about that company calculator?

[martin_nooteboom]

Maybe there was something fishy yesterday, Kjetil. As now you are second, But to a company with a lot of contributors. But you are still second so don't feel to sorry for yourself and I imagine the vacation is still valid....

Regards,

Martin

Message was edited by:

Martin Nooteboom

[Former Member]

what I've generally observed, ( at least in the XI & Java programming forums where I contribute) is the people who copy paste the answers & are very very eager to answer the simplest of questions,purely for the sake of points they definitely disappear after few days....and that is because to some extent their contribution quality is judged by the community itself and shown the proper way then ;)...such people collect very good number of points in the begining and then it gradually decreases...may be the sole motive was to get a 1/4K or 1/2K T....

though the idea of giving away rewards for even 1/4K points would definitely encourage ppl to contribute...these are kinda side effects of it is what I feel.

[Former Member]

hi aneesh,

I think you make some good points, some others I see different.

I do share the observation, that questions cannot be trivial enough or having been answered too often, and you still find people answering them, almost always with copy & paste. Actually this must be attributed to the points system. To me there seems to be another influence, that is, some kind of "over-politeness"(very much promoted by the responsibles for this forum) in comparison to other sucessful forums. Elsewhere you might well get a sharp RTFM, a pointer to the FAQs or an explanation of netiquette in general. These kind of answers are educative to newbies and serve some important kind of self-regulatory function to any community. Here this is not happening and (seems not to be) welcome. Therefore newbies get the impression that no question is too trivial to ask and that it isn't a problem to ask a question again which could be found answered with great probability already.

Another point is the t-shirt thingy. Is it really t-shirts? To some t-shirts seem to play an inexplicable important role. No question, it's nice to get a t-shirt with a cool slogan on it and some people seem to become really angry when they do not get their t-shirt the day after they reached milestone X.

But to me there seems to be another point. I am not sure about it, but in some places (regions, companies) in this world simple numbers (parameters) in a CV seem to play a much more important role (or at least equally important role) then outcome of a professional interview or the assessment of personality (personal potential) . In other words, it seems to be more important to have 4387 points at a "recognized institution" than what you really have to say (had to say there).

The question to me is, shall we as the community or the community managers be concerned or do something about it? Personally I do not care (although I obviously observe it) why people hunt for points or why recruiters maybe overestimate the value of those rankings, and in the areas I am interested in I very well know the people wo really have something to say (IMHO) regardless of what score they have. I just speak out occasionally, when I have an impression that the quality of one of my favourite communities is about to decrease. Currently I am in such a mood (therefore the lengthy comment) because I think the S/N ratio is slowly decreasing, not because the signal wasn't high but because the noise (duplicates, trivialities, references-to-references-to-references-to-...) is increasing faster.

IMHO, the problems mentioned can only be changed by revolutionizing the reward system...or by strongly enhanced search algorithms better taking into account the relevance of a forum thread.

kind regards,

anton

[marilyn_pratt]

If you still care enough to write about the worrisome signal/noise ratio that means we haven't entirely lost you yet, Anton, thank goodness.

But before I jump to the conclusion that the directives have been too polite and this is a failed mechanism, I will question the context a bit. Perhaps in forums where people are very comfortable with <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFM">RTFM</a> ways of response, or are conditioned to take that kind of "brutal honesty", we could do with more directness. (I needed to go to the urban dictionary to look the acronym up, by the way and realize it is direct, hardly polite and might even be considered offensive in some circles). Which brings me to the question: does such an approach work with less technical, more business type folks. Here I'll also go out on a limb and say there might even be a generation/age discrepancy of target audiences and certain kinds of behaviors might work less well with certain audiences. Do geeks have higher tolerance for brutal honesty and more direct approach? Will business folks "take" the criticism and continue to hang around or just storm off insulted? The forums you allude to, I'm guessing are more technologist oriented. Is there a difference in audience response, education, tolerance? Should there be?

[Former Member]

Marilyn,

that seems to be a matter of perspective. I do see no difference if it is a geek or suit, or people from different generations if such people do not adhere to some common (common to all online communities and layed out specifically here) rules of engagement, stomping in and throwing in questions like 'ASAP: Gimme all info about ASAP' (Me not knowing ASAP thought of it meaning an other common acronym when I saw that post). Personally I see this beviour as being rude and something like RTFM as an appropriate answer (although I am not used to use the F* word in my everyday's life).

And I believe that, regardless of age, profession, sex, etc., such people are very well aware of the fact, that they are not behaving in the socially best way, but they simply consider their time to be more valuable than that of others.

anton

[Former Member]

Agree with you 100% Anton, the difference is the one offers. We have a large percentage of people frantically wanting to "earn" points thinking that this will open the doors for them or perhaps they are told to. Not much we can do about that other than to take the focus off of the "points" and put it onto the Content. It seems to be working with the blogs (sure we are still doing some house cleaning) and it's certainly OK in the Wiki but the forums are another beast all together.

A lot of suggestions all involve limitations or addition of "elitism" thinking in the forums to prevent this. My thought goes with yours WTF and RTF FAQ and "search for it", certainly the search is not 100% perfect none are but if you follow the numbers and click pattern of the users the search is simply not the first thing or even the 5th the users try to use. You have people so eager to answer that it makes more sense to just post it.

We should start a "Search for it!" campaign I think and actually reward people for searching for it - ok see all of sudden back to some sort of a "points" system - hard to escape something that for the most part works just fine.

[Former Member]

Hi all.

Craig, you say the search is not 100% perfect, but I do use it often when I read a

question and I have the feeling I have already saw a similar thread. Often it is

sufficient to pick one key word of the thread caption to find the solution in the first

result screen of the search page.

More funny is that sometimes the same question was posted only hours ago and

comes up just 3 lines under the new one.

I definetly agree with you that we have to encourage people to use the search

function first. I guess there could be a lot of cool functions like phonetic search

which also could be somehow integrated in the 'post new thread' functionality, so if

the user enters the subject of his new question the system searchs in the

backround for possible answers and shows a list of threads that handle the same

topic immediatly while user is typing (like in the Firefox Google Plugin).

But I do not know if it is worth the effortm, cause I bet users will still just post there question.

If you start rewarding users who search you have adivse people about this new

feature. So maybe BIG READ CAPITOL LETTERS on top of the 'Post Message'

page which reminds people on first search then ask would be a good start.

Cheers,

Sascha

[pokrakam]

Interesting points regarding brutal honesty.

I personally don't see any reason to treat business people different to techies. I think the reason the term RTFM is (was?) more prevalent in the techie world is far simpler: there have traditionally been more manuals available for technological things than there are for business issues

The principle remains the same though. If business people ask me to spec something I consider unsuitable I'll tell them it's a rubbish idea. Same thing. I also agree with Anton and Craig that a little directness can go a long way. Personally I find posts like far ruder than RTFM.

Bottom line: If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the forums (or something like that).

Cheers,

Mike

[Former Member]

Hi Everyone,

I do agree that searching should definetly done before posting a question. When I sometimes look at a question posted here of which i have no clue, i try to search it and almost everytime i find that a more or less similar thread has already been posted.

I dont think we can ever stop new-bies from posting questions which are typical, but may be the best solution would be that people should stop answering those questions, instead should encourage people to search before they post a thread.

Regards

Aneesh.

[marilyn_pratt]

@Anton - "they simply consider their time to be more valuable than that of others", that's the heart of the matter indeed and certainly a trigger for a lot of anger and resentment, and yes, no less repulsive than using bad language. Selfishness is one of the ugliest things.

@Mike - and perhaps I will need to concede that if you don't play by the rules here, or are able to grasp them, however culturally challenging, perhaps this isn't the right playground....or you go off and create your own.

@Sascha, @Aneesh and @Craig- good points about search. How do we make people take that step. I've been pretty ruthless about moving stuff with no explanation. Moving to the garbage is the next step

[Former Member]

What additionally came to my mind why people are such point hunters is the 'TOP COMPANIES' page.

Couldn't it be that some companies want to have a good reanking in this list and force their employess to post by hook or by crook?

Cheers,

Sascha

[Former Member]

Hi Marilyn

Regarding getting people to search....

How about a field when a new forum post is being created which asks for "Search string I used before posting". If this is blank, then maybe we don't allow the posting - open to discussion on that - but if it contains a search string then we can see what sorts of ways people are trying to search and then optimize Snoogle accordingly.

I think it would be interesting to see what people consider to be a useful search string. Is "ABAP beginner" appropriate, for example?

Cheers

[former_member583013]

It seems that people thinks that they're going to a "bonus" if their companies made it to the Top Companies List....

I use my personal mail on my business card...Ok...I'm a Freelance so I don't work for any companie LOL But still...I would never use my company ID...Why? Because I made the contributions not my company -;)

I think that one of the reasons because we have so less Peruavian on the SDN, it's just because Peruvian Companies are not aware or even doesn't care about SDN....Otherwise...We will had a lot of Peruvian point hunters....

Regarding the original theme of the post...People is too lazy to perform a search....They just want to open their mails and find an awesome answer to their questions...I have made just a few posts on the ABAP Forums...Because I do search...I can spend 2 hours searching...And when I realized that there's no good or available answer, then I post a question and always reward the corresponding points....The way it has to be -;)

Greetings,

Blag.

[marilyn_pratt]

A low tech, but perhaps effective way is to have people preface all questions with: "this is what I have done, first before posting". Again, it's about educating.

It needs persistent moderation and lots of cooperation to do that.

Snoogle? Is that about optimizing the pillow or cushion? As in ....<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leachco-Snoogle-Total-Body-Pillow/dp/B0000635WI">Snoogle</a>. The message: Folks are sick of babying the participants.

[Former Member]

Hi Marilyn

"Snoogle" refers to a blog I posted last year asking for suggestions from changing the search area in SCN. To my shame, I never got round to awarding the best suggestion...

Cheers

[KKilhavn]

This discussion is indeed an interesting one. I also see Mike Pokraka have replied, he can testify that I sometimes let out a little steam on an unsuspecting newbie

<b>First of all, before I forget it: SAP has already implemented a solution for this, so why not copy it to SDN.</b> You can't post a support message on service.sap.com without searching first. At least I have not found it possible. So after searching for OSS Notes, you start entering the Customer Message and SAP performs a new search for you. For those who have learnt to search first this will not give any useful information, but I think it would be a good thing to do something similar in SDN.

On to what interests me more: how to train new users that needs training in acceptable behaviour (netiquette). Frequently Asked Questions have been around for ages. Replies along the lines of "read the FAQ" were not uncommon on UseNet (they probably aren't nowadays either, but I don't use UseNet anymore). And nobody can tell me that UseNet was only for geeks. Perhaps more geeks than blue-collar people, but alt.kill-the-whales was not particularly technical. This is not rude, it is just a signal that people can't ignore the guidelines of behaviour completely. A common advice for new users was to "lurk" (read without posting) for a while first to get familiar with the news group's culture.

Similarly, every forum has a post or two at the top which new users are expected to read. Using "URGENT" in the title is one of the things you are told to not do. My personal contribution is to try and ignore any question with "URGENT" in the title for 24 hours as a minimum.

As has been mentioned by others here, some people seem to think that others are there to serve them. If there is no response within an hour they will even post a follow-up in their own question! Well, screw polite in such cases. Now, I am from Norway where calling a shovel a shovel (kalle en spade en spade) is old tradition. We do not call it "a tool which can be used for many things, amongst others moving soil, or sand, from one spot to the other - if you wish to do so".

Some other cultures, Asian cultures in particular, have a tradition where giving a straight message that someone made an error or otherwise screwed up, is something you just don't do. This is often a nice and pleasant thing, but it can also lead to more tragic results such as incorrect winners in the Olympics or - even worse - serious errors going into productive SAP systems.

One should have respect for each other. However, as Norway pointed out to USA when they didn't like us not participating in illegal warfare to occupy Iraq: Being a good friend includes telling your friend when he is about to make an error.

It is not to be rude or evil we tell people to 'RTFM' or 'please read the FAQ before you post'. We do it because we want to continue using the forums, and we want the forums to be useful. For those who used UseNet they may know that there were moderated and unmoderated groups. For instance, for a C++ developer, reading the moderated group was something that took perhaps an hour a day. Reading the unmoderated group could take half if not all of your day. So where does everyone think one could get the best advice?

Not the least: is it in SAP's and SDN's interest that the more experienced members quit using the forum because there are so many meaningless posts compared to the interesting ones? If you had to choose, wouldn't you rather see a few offended beginners who soon realise that when they start getting experienced and get stuck after trying a whole day on their own, that is when they <b>really</b> appreciate and need the help they can get on SDN?

[Former Member]

> Do geeks have higher tolerance

> for brutal honesty and more direct approach?

<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html">This guy</a> would seem to think so. This is sort of a classic, I'm pretty surprised nobody posted it before.

> Will

> business folks "take" the criticism and continue to

> hang around or just storm off insulted?

More likely cry about it or tell tales behind your back.