How can I browse open questions for a specific product?

[ricardojasso]

I would like to see a list of open (unanswered) questions for only my product of interest. Moreover I would like to be able to see this list each time I login to the Community site.

Moreover, I'm having a hard time selecting a primary tag to post this question since it is a general question about Community Q&A; I had to open a new window and look at other questions to see what tags where used and select one that seemed appropriate.

[ricardojasso]

I'm closing this question because there appear to be no straightforward way to browse for questions about a specific product. The answers given require several not so obvious steps to accomplish my request. I was looking for a straightforward way to do this. Browsing for open questions is not the same as searching for answers. They are different user requirements and need a different solution each one. So I'll go to the Ideas Place and post my requirement there and hope it will be considered by the developers.

[moshenaveh]

Hi Ricardo,

Steffi is correct. The idea is to use comments only for the discussion around the question (e.g. clarification) I know it's confusing and we are working on making more distinction here.

In the upcoming days I will work on updating the community page about Q&A

http://go.sap.com/community/about/questions-and-answers.html

also please post any feedback you might have in our idea place session:

https://ideas.sap.com/sapcommunity

Which will allow other users support your ideas/feedback which will help promote it.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Moshe

[VeselinaPeykova]

Do you sincerely believe, that the same people, who tag an SD/MM question as SAP Forum are going to search for the explanation here, read and understand it?

Why it is so hard to accept the fact, that considering the user base and the specific requirements, the comment/answer experiment was unsuccessful and explore possible options, which make more sense? I am more than sure, that if the SCN team asks the UX experts, who are SAP employees and perform some brain-storming, they can come up with lots of great ideas, without the need of SCN forum members to assume a designer's role in this project.

[former_member186338]

100% agree that answer/comment approach is not working and resulted in the loss of readability of discussions! But looks like it's simply not possible for the existing team to modify the engine of the forum. Instead of looking for technical solution we will get instructions how to properly use square wheels.

[former_member28818]

Hello Ricardo,

Please go to the All Questions page for the primary tag of your interest. For Using SAP.com that would be :
https://answers.sap.com/questions/metadata/24527/using-sapcom.html

You can find this page by clicking the Primary tag from any question:

And from the All Questions page, you can click the Unanswered Questions:

Thanks!

[ricardojasso]

"You can find this page by clicking the Primary tag from any question"

But then I have to first search for a question related to my product of interest and that I don't want to do. It would be much better to have a link on the main page that allows me to select a tag related to my product of interest and store that information along side the question status selection in a cookie so each time I login the same tag is selected and the same question status filter is applied.

[Private_Member_7726]

You are kind of expected to use your own bookmarks to browse for that, and to somehow (via tag Excel, for example) find that "first question" for a tag. 😞

[former_member181891]

I understand the pain here and we're working to get a better system in place to navigate your frequent/preferred topics.

Best,

Jamie

[ricardojasso]

Thank you Jamie. You see, I posted this question three days ago and got an initial response but then nothing. I suspected it got buried down the queue so today I went to the question via my account profile and posted a comment to it to have it pop up in the questions queue which are sorted by Updated status by default. Apparently this is what it takes to have the question visible so someone will notice and answer/comment on it.

Another related thing that I just found is that if the question has at least one answer then it won't appear in the questions list when the filter is set to Unanswered Questions. But the question has not really been answered yet... or at least correctly answered. So there seems to be differences in concept of what an answered question is among the site builders and the community. If the teacher asks the classroom how much is 2 plus 2 someone might answer 5. So the question has been answered but obviously an incorrect answer has been given. In my opinion the question should not be considered answered until the teacher says so. Which in our case is when the OP marks the answer as the correct answer. This worked so well in the previous system I'm amazed it was changed to the current scheme where users can vote on answers with the apparent intention to have the correct answer naturally find its way to the top. This is a flawed design in my opinion and should seriously be revised.

[Steffi_Warnecke]

Hello Ricardo,

the voting is more like the "helpful answer" of the new platform. Under each answer (not comment) you as OP should see "Accept". This is for the correct answer and to mark the thread as answered.

Regards,

Steffi.

[ricardojasso]

Steffi. Thanks for the clarification. Still, I have two observations:

1) A "helpful answer" status should also be limited to the OP. There is no need to have a voting process for this and worst of all the voting process breaks the chronology of the replies (comments, answers, etc.).

2) Why can't I mark a comment as the correct answer which in the previous site happened very often? I understand you can turn a comment into an answer but this again breaks the chronology of the replies. This chronology of replies was the greatest strength of the previous site against other sites like StackOverflow.

Regards, Ricardo.

[Steffi_Warnecke]

I know, it's confusing, but I'm afraid this is how the new q&a system works. Voting is supposed to help bring good answers to the top (like liking, you see that other members find this post helpful, too). And comments aren't answers, so you can't accept them as such.

A lot of other members have already voiced their opinion about this (especially comments vs answers), but I don't know what the SCN team will make of this and if they can with the underlying platform. Time will tell.

You can change the sorting of the answers (right side at the start of them). I hope they will implement an option to set the default yourself (I'd love to have everything sorted from old to new because of chronology).

I'm sorry I can't be of more help. Just explaining the best I know. 🙂

[former_member181891]

Thanks to you both for your observations & questions. Let me ask Moshe, our Q&A expert, to weigh in on this.