Avoiding Duplicate threads by giving Transforming authority?

[Former Member]

Hi All.

I just going through couple of threads , Almost all the people are creating duplicate threads because they didnt find the answer in one forum or its semi-relevant to the forum....

Just like HR-ABAP its require functional knowledge and technical knowledge too.....

So if the thread owner has the authoirty to move from ABAP-General to SAP-HR will it makes sense

Regards

Satish

ps: Just to make my 10 ques limitation I am closing this thread.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Funny thing you should say that actually, because I know of a duplicate person who would feel exactly the same way about it.

Where is she now when we need her...

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Well that's not my question Gentleman......What you say about this? Will this avoid Duplicates?

Satish

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

A better option in my opinion would be to "mirror" threads which are cross-functional to multiple forums - but it still remains one thread. This means that the gurus from the forums all see each other's answers at the same time although they enter via different forums.

Hell, it would be almost like Twitter

It has been suggested before and other forum software has such features, it's just that we don't.

So yes, I think you can either close the thread or count to 6 billion, or was it only 5 billion... Are you feeling lucky today?

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

>

> A better option in my opinion would be to "mirror" threads which are cross-functional to multiple forums - but it still remains one thread. This means that the gurus from the forums all see each other's answers at the same time although they enter via different forums.
> 
> Hell, it would be almost like Twitter 
> 
> It has been suggested before and other forum software has such features, it's just that we don't.
> 
> So yes, I think you can either close the thread or count to 6 billion, or was it only 5 billion...  Are you feeling lucky today?
> 
> Cheers,
> Julius

That also Sounds fine :)..........Just feeling how SAP has been growing in version's SDN is not parallely doing the same.

> So yes, I think you can either close the thread or count to 6 billion, or was it only 5 billion...

I didnt understand what's you mean...

> Are you feeling lucky today?

Infact I am thinking you are lucky for Answering First and winning 10 easy points !!!

Satish

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

> I didnt understand what's you mean...

What I meant is that it might take a while.

> 10 easy points !!!

Actually I thought they were quite difficult ones.

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Ya it's not easy that's why I said you are lucky

Well Back to topic ...

Really we need to get through this ...I dont think we require much logic to change this also...Just like giving Editing authority we can give Transfer authority as well.

Satish

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

So, you post a question in ERP financials and I give an answer; then you move it to ABAP, but if I am not watching ABAP, I may never see the continuation of the thread. I think mirroring or making the post available in multiple forums is better.

Rob

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

>

> So, you post a question in ERP financials and I give an answer; then you move it to ABAP, but if I am not watching ABAP, I may never see the continuation of the thread. I think mirroring or making the post available in multiple forums is better.
> 
> Rob

> I think mirroring

No clue what concept it is

> making the post available in multiple forums is better

Mutiple forums visibilty will be good but who is going to decide in how many forums its need to visible?

satish

If you watch your threads that you reply thats fine whether its moved to some other form also if still it under watch list the thread remains the same.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

>

> Mutiple forums visibilty will be good but who is going to decide in how many forums its need to visible?

The original poster, but have a limit to how many forums it can appear in.

Rob

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

That sounds Fantastic ....Appreciate your feed Back Julius , Rob...

But Who is going to take forward then is this wathced by somebody or do we need to Email SDN requesting additional feature?

Satish

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

See in this forum. But I think I already made that suggestion there.

Rob

[Former Member]

I think we're getting to technical here. We're talking about how to implement rather than what are the business requirements.

What I would like is to post a thread once and have the ability to make it visible in multiple forums (along with all replies).

Rob

[Former Member]

Well Rob,Julius you are correct and we respect people opnion too either...

Ok Harald...If this functionality is not there then Just some one is going to post abap-general where he doesn't find the appropriate response,

Then he post agian to SAP-HR where we find as duplicating threads and we delete the thread , and We say Forum is green and good quality.....Is this what we expect ? I belive rules are taken to help people , customers but not vice versa....

Now we may say no duplicate threads thats correct , But the real indeed of forum helping users, developers is not 100% reached....We may become confuse for some time appearing the same thread in 3 different places but .. it simply we may add a Note on head just like 'watch thread' , 'Mirror thread' ...............

satish

[Former Member]

Ok, I'll be quiet after one last comment, because it seems I'm really poor at expressing my thoughts, so let me try one last time...

@Julius: I suspect your comment on misspelled or not-able-to-guess tags was not meant seriously, but I still respond ;-). It's trivial to keep a list of tags and of course not everybody should be able to make up new tags. However, you could easily see that it might be beneficial if trusted power users could possibly do that and thus easily respond to changing needs...

@Rob: My wish list is a bit longer than yours regarding categorization ;-). I want to filter and aggregate postings (using categories assigned to threads/messages) across possible access channels (SDN forum web site, RSS, etc.), but I'd prefer not to see duplicate messages in my channels whenever possible. Ideally as much relevant categories as possible are assigned during the initial posting, but naturally it does make sense that others (again, I'm thinking power users) could possible update or assign new categories later.

I think it's clear that most threads usually can be assigned to different (possibly orthogonal) categories. A structure that allows a fine grained categorization is ideal, e.g. let's say I'm interested in any JCo3 (SAP Java Connector version 3.x) topics. Obviously it's unlikely that there ever will be a forum for that (what would happen once we switch to version 4, 5 and so on?). Maybe I'd like to further cut it down to JCo3 and RFC server programs (both should match). Obviously you can think of tons of other examples, but basically my main message is that tags allow you to do all that nicely...

@All: If anybody is interested how tagging (along with combination of RSS feeds) works very well, check my favorite site [stackoverflow.com|http://stackoverflow.com/]. Not sure how everybody else deals with the amount of traffic in the SDN forums, but I'm using RSS to help me to get to the (for me) relevant stuff. If anybody knows a better way, I'm more than happy to hear about it.

Note that the RSS solution can already aggregate and filter (just a feature of the RSS client), because one could easily subscribe to interesting individual forums and then apply a content filter using some key words. E.g. one could for example also subscribe to ABAP forums and filter by keyword HR (or whatever other relevant key words come to mind). Obviously not a good solution, but in my opinion the best one could do with the current version of SDN forums.

@Satish: So I see two problems: It would be nice if the forums by default offer more possibilities as we can see by our never-ending wish-list-postings. As long as this doesn't happen, it might actually help to try to educate users what can be done with the current functionality. Looking at the majority of questions posted in the forums I suspect this is a futile task though...

Cheers, harald

[Former Member]

> @Julius: I suspect your comment on misspelled or not-able-to-guess tags was not meant seriously, but I still respond ;-). It's trivial to keep a list of tags and of course not everybody should be able to make up new tags. However, you could easily see that it might be beneficial if trusted power users could possibly do that and thus easily respond to changing needs...

Okay, now I understand. Sorry I was a bit distracted when reading it the first time.

I think these tags are cool and would help people wanting to answer or search to find the topics accross multiple forums.

I am still undecided however whether it would prevent someone from cross-posting to multiple forums in the first place to find the gurus or when the approach of the solution turns from technical to functional capabilities - which is what the question originally was and I suspect that Satish was tempted.

@ Satish: What would you do if you had 2 user ID's and could cross-post to ABAP General and HCM with each of them and it would go undetected?

Cheers,

Julius

[OttoGold]

@All: If anybody is interested how tagging (along with combination of RSS feeds) works very well, check my favorite site stackoverflow.com. 

Dear Harald, there are days when I would bet you´re selling stackoverflow services or something:)))) You have mentioned like a zillion times:))) Keep going. Regards Otto

[Former Member]

>

 > @ Satish: What would you do if you had 2 user ID's and could cross-post to ABAP General and HCM with each of them and it would go undetected?  
 > Cheers,
> Julius

Lol!! Will you people leave it then? we can Just simply identify by the problem it's cross posted.....

Then SDN COPS or SDN FBI's will come down and rant at Coffee corner or somwhere First Judgement will be "Locking" and If the ranting doesn't stop every one knows the Final Judgement will be................ "GHOST" ..Do we require that

On a serious note..

Well the whole mess start's here...If some one is not doing intentionally wrong and he is having valid reason then SDN should show some way to avoid that ....

Harold it's really appreciate you have clearly explained about tags with example.... But we just need some best solution that's it

We know lot of people(Guru's) are restricted to one forum always .This will reall enlighten every one.

Satish

[Former Member]

> If some one is not doing intentionally wrong and he is having valid reason then SDN should show some way to avoid that ....

Definately agree with you. Many do not do it intentionally but (at least at first) think it is a good idea to involve more people and get other views from other skillsets. That should be encouraged without it being a pest.

It breaks my heart sometimes and closes one eye at others when I see that there already are knowledgable and interesting answers to 2 or more of the duplicate threads by the time it is found or reported.

9 times out of 10 the duplicates are neglected once the OP finds what they were looking for.

Mirroring is the solution to all these innocent problems IMO and the less innocent have no excuse anymore to cross-post.

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member]

Harald wrote:
Ok, I'll be quiet after one last comment

Liar! I'm running low on patience and I'm just an iota away from reporting your unacceptable behavior...

Julius wrote:
I am still undecided however whether it would prevent someone from cross-posting to multiple forums in the first place to find the gurus or when the approach of the solution turns from technical to functional capabilities

Tagging or mirroring should prevent cross-postings (as there's no point to do that any longer). However, they obviously don't solve the problem of multiple postings, where people somehow try to bring their question back to the top to get an answer...

I think the main problem in the forums is that the use models we complain about (cross-postings, ask-and-forget, trivial questions, no initiative or research, etc.) are actually too common and seem accepted by most users. If unwanted postings would always get a consistent don't-do-it-response by community members, I doubt it would be necessary to talk about it.

So as long as we have enough people willing to answer anything (either for collecting points or because they are more forgiving) I suspect we need moderators or similar concepts to take care of forum violations. I'm really grateful to all moderators who sacrifice their valuable time to make this a better place - considering the traffic though, I'd say we need way more power users for keeping the forums clean.

Otto wrote:
there are days when I would bet you´re selling stackoverflow services or something:)))) You have mentioned like a zillion times:)))

I plead guilty to repetitive postings and mentioning the site too often; obviously I'm not a sales person, because my postings are neither convincing nor very polished...

Let me offer you as an alternative site superuser.com...ok, that really was a cheap trick now, I apologize - at least to those who read fine print....

@All: For anybody who's not asleep yet, a silly example for tagging (and my apologies for choosing a non-SAP example due to lack of features on SDN): Let's say I'm interested in java on android, but I don't care about eclipse and as I don't have much time I want to skip any beginner questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java+android+-eclipse+-beginner (an or combination is also possible). Might sound bogus for now, but if you've ever searched for specific content you'll start to appreciate such flexibility. Why settle for less...

Cheers, harald

[Former Member]

The bugger is still the temptation to cross-post and create chained series of questions, along with the difficulty in spotting them.

If the OP knew that a well thought out question with meaningfull subject title is the fastest path with least resistance then we would have less "repeat offenders" and "passive offender" who tolerate the grey area in the hope of a few ponitz.

They are the biggest problem in my opinion.

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member]

I'm surprised that the mirroring approach resurfaces here in the forums. In my opinion this is much too limited and doesn't reflect the way we consume information.

The way to go is [tagging|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29], e.g. just check out how blogs are published on SCN. In the end all I want to do is to subscribe to/see a feed of postings relevant for me. Obviously a fixed forum structure (even with mirrored threads) is an odd approach for that, because it doesn't help me in combining for example the Security and ABAP Performance and Tuning forum.

Sites with tag support usually allow you to define what you want to see by using a combination of filters (i.e. limit content) and aggregation (i.e. combine content). Also, the used tags are much more fine-grained than the coarse structure we have in the forums, thus making it much easier to identify content that matters to you (especially relevant on a site like SDN with tons of postings).

And if you're still not convinced, tags allow you also to use orthogonal classifications. E.g. imagine we'd add to each posting a knowledge level tag between beginner and expert. That way I could filter easily all the beginner stuff that I'm not interested in.

Cheers, harald

p.s.: I requested tagging already in thread (where also the mirroring was mentioned).

[Former Member]

The problem I see is that having a 1 : 1 thread : tag ratio is not efficient to find both threads in both forums and earmarking users is not really scalable either.

Mirroring which I have seen on other forums works nicely.

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member]

The problem I see is that having a 1 : 1 thread : tag ratio is not efficient to find both threads in both forums

You lost me here. You can assign multiple tags to one thread. As long as the application allows you to properly filter and aggregate on tags you have all the power you need. And as far as efficiency is concerned you can easily see that this works out nicely by looking at other sites.

I don't understand the mirror solution at all, because it seems really awkward. Let's assume that a thread is mirrored in three forums and I'm interested in all of them. I'd expect that this means that I'd find the thread three times and would myself have to recognize that it's basically duplicates. I'm also assuming that for external clients (e.g. RSS feeds) this would look like three different threads (because it would have to be published for each forum). If my assumptions are correct I'd call this pollution and for me it's almost as bad as (and comparable to) cross-posting (though it avoids having different content in all those threads).

[Former Member]

This mirroring is like nesting - the thread only physically exists once, but posts to it can all be seen in all forums it is nested into.

Think of it as forums being the tags.

Your idea of tagging would be cool as well though.

Many threads and blogs belong in the wiki anyway and that offers labels. I guess SDN support can tell us that the functionality does exist, except we are using the wrong transaction and the thread is already closed.

Anyway, that is unlikely to help Satish's original question here, also because no one would ever be able to guess what the tag might be or how it would be spellt...

Cheers,

Julius