Attachment option for forum members - Suggestion

[Former Member]

Hi,

In the forums, a lot of users are asking for sending documents to their mail ids. I was thinking if we could introduce the concept of attachments to the forum posts on a trial basis for the forum members (I'm aware that its present for the moderators currently).

The attachments could be kept for a certain time frame and then deleted so as not to consume a lot of space. I know there are a lot of blogs and wikis related to various topics, but thats still not stopping users from asking for documents and more often than not they don't search before posting. Now with the attachment concept, at least the trend of people trading documents over the emails would minimize if not stop totally and a lot of forum members would also benefit as the documents can be shared with a broader audience. Most of the documents being asked for are standard how tos but in some cases people have come up with innovative solutions and also have peculiar problems for which they've documented out of box solutions. In such cases these documents would be great for other members as well. This would give us a lot of good material and experiences that come out of these personal documents and would be available to a greater audience rather than being lost in emails.

Please let me know you thoughts on the same.

Again I don't know the logistics of achieving this,its just a thought on my part.

Cheers,

Kedar

P.S : A lot of forum users don't seem to be aware of the 'How to Contribute -> Content Submission System' for adding attachments to the posts through the SDN team and hence my suggestion of the attachments for the users on a trial basis.

Edited by: Kedar Patil on Jun 21, 2008 10:59 PM

[Former Member]

Now that I've done my rant about the negative, if someone has done a unique solution then direct them to the wiki or the "How to Contribute" link and help them share their work with EVERYONE and be recognized for that great work!

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/submitcontent

[Former Member]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions. Now that I've got a reply that I was expecting , is there a way wherein if somebody does send out emails asking for documentation, can that be deleted automatically and also at the same time abuse be reported as it violates the rules of engagements. The moderators and regular users can't be in all the threads all the times.

Also regular users who are not moderators don't have the authorization of deleting out the email addresses (though they can report abuse....) in the posts, but can only point out ; not asking for documents over emails, but other users might end up sending over documents to the email addresses specified.So this defeats the entire purpose of the forums....

Cheers,

Kedar

Edited by: Kedar Patil on Jun 23, 2008 4:18 AM

[Former Member]

We have filters in place to remove messages with certain keywords before they are posted and every user has the ability to click the abuse button, so as long as the users "want" to clean things up these measures should be enough to help make a difference.

[Former Member]

Hi Craig,

Just a quick clarification on the filters. Is this filter mechanism already in place? Coz I am still seeing threads with the phrases "plz...", "urgent" in XI forum.

Regards,

Jaishankar

[pokrakam]

The problem is that filters are not intelligent and can therefore only include the most obvious. Three letter words can be acronyms (e.g. 'plz' is a German abbreviation for postal code), and 'urgent' is a perfectly valid business term, as well as 'email' and 'id'.

Cheers,

Mike

[Former Member]

The filters are not for "urgent" and "plz" but mainly for the exchange of copyrighted material and yes they are in effect and have been quite effect for awhile now.

We of course have to review as there are many phrases one can use to accomplish this.

[Former Member]

Hi,

I would agree with Craig's assessment here. Even if we put more filters in place people do come up with ingenious ways to avoid those. I've seen people put email addresses in different way, ex 'abc at yahoo dot com' and so on and so forth....

So, I guess the users would have to be more vigilant and want to stop this practice of asking for documents...

Will wait for a couple of days more and see if anybody else has any comments and inputs before closing out this thread.

Cheers,

Kedar

[Former Member]

I partially agree and disagree.

I agree with concerns but disagree as it is causing a bottleneck for agility and effectiveness addressing user needs.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" (and pictures come in a file).

If we are concerned about disk space, then I feel we need to provision hard disk space and nourish the SAP Community Network to be effective and improved.

For example: Business Objects products often deals with reports and users often enquiry ways to cleverly use our tools.

Imagine how unproductive users find the forum messages when everyone is trying to describe what they see in their screens. And how much misunderstanding happened among all those involved in the discussion of the thread.

It didnt' take me more than a few months to realize that users are all crying out for ways to add a descriptive image into their forum message.

Some are clever and add a link to an external location, some leave their email addresses and some leave their phone numbers!

The other challenge is for Chinese,Korean and Japanese language users. An Asian user seeking for help is unable to describe properly in a foreign language to gain visibility for wider audience, often they are not familiar with the naming of the functionality in english because he/she may never have seen the menus in English.

I recently observed a user describing a problem there were 14 notes back and forth for a very simple matter, it took 3 days. I believe a screenshot with a red circle would have helped in one shot.

I suggest files to be allowed and filters put in place distinguishing file formats to allow right content.

[Former Member]

Attachments especially for this reason will never happen! 99% of the documents the users are requesting are copyrighted material available to customers via the Service Marketplace or are items such as eBooks which require someone to purchase them and thus we will NEVER enable these unprofessional users to continue such activity and certainly not enable them to do it better!

There is absolutely no reason to send documents to another user via email. If it's customer documents and you are a customer or partner you already have access to them - just have to be proactive and go download them yourself or ask those in your organization who have access to the service marketplace to download them.

If it's an eBook, well that's just plain absurd that anyone would be so unprofessional to "trade" such items, the authors put a lot of work into these books and will only continue to do so if they are taken advantage of. Trading these books is stealing from the author, would you want someone stealing from you?

So as noble as your suggestion is in order to try to redirect the activities anyone requesting such documents should automatically have the abuse button clicked on their thread. Anyone who actually sends the documents will be banned from posting in the future.