Release Highlights, as of December 2, 2016
This blog post continues the series of updates highlighting the latest features and fixes for SAP Community.
I published the first of these posts back on November 19. Here’s what has happened since then:
- When members look at the list of questions on the Questions & Answers page, they’ll see which questions they’ve already clicked.
- Crawler optimization, better merge processes, and cross-linking of search tools yield better results, and new options enable the manual boosting of popular content in these results as well.
- Members now see profile changes in their activity stream for people they follow.
- Performance improvements and clearer instructions have been added to direct messaging — including an explanation about the search functionality within the chat tool.
- Additional topic tags are available when creating content in Portuguese (Brazilian) and Japanese — so more posts and questions can be published in these languages.
- To help improve the user experience, alerts and error messages have been changed or rewritten to make the information easier to understand.
- New features allow moderators to find assignments more quickly and easily, provide clearer explanations to posters about content issues, and identify members who are providing the most helpful answers.
If you’d like the complete list of the latest updates, check the release notes in the SAP Community wiki every two weeks. You can also log in to the wiki and “watch” the page — so you’ll receive automated updates whenever we add or change the release notes. And if you’d like to report bugs and request features for future releases of the platform, please continue to follow the instructions on the Reporting Bugs and Providing Feedback After Go Live page.
Thanks for an update, Jerry!
I'm sure this will fall under "ugh, there is just no pleasing these people" category, but... 🙂 I've already noticed that the links to the questions previously opened are now greyed out. It's hardly noticeable though since SCN GUI has become "50 shades of grey" but that's another subject.
While it is helpful to see that I've already visited a question, it can also be confusing since the color does not change if there are further updates in the question. I.e. you open a question once and the color changes forever. So next day I'm looking at the question list and now I have a mix of colors. Then I need to look at the time stamps to figure out whether I've already opened the question today or it was updated from the last visit.
The email notifications should alleviate this somewhat but I'm curious why didn't SCN just go the same route as any other php forum (e.g. City Data)? In those forums all the threads either created or updated since the last visit are in different color. And one can mark the forum as read any time. I'm not sure how StackOverflow works but all other forums I visit work like that and it seems perfectly fine to everyone.
How is it possible to answer, comment and edit without reading? I somehow made it as you can see:
Dunno Jürgen, I have not noticed anything like that so far (I use Chrome). Everything is possible for you, I guess. Wouldn't be surprised if you can answer a question without even opening it. 🙂
Hi Jelena,
Thank you for this feedback. It makes sense. I will raise it with IT although I can't commit it will change soon as they have a lot on thier plate.
Thanks again,
Moshe
Hi, Jelena:
I believe "50 Shades of Grey" is probably much better at pleasing people, but I digress... 🙂
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to the color question. But, as always, I'll try my best to get some sort of explanation. Worst case scenario, this could always become a submission via Idea Place...
Thanks!
Best regards,
--Jerry
I was actually starting to think that I have developed some form visual impairment) - I did not see links changing color in answers.sap.com.
I tried "open in new tab", tried clicking the link and going back from the same tab, tried opening the same page after clicking a link to a question, tried opening links from tag pages - the color looks the same to me (Firefox ESR 45.5.1, Pale Moon 27.0.2). To be on the safe side, I compared the colors of the links of two questions (visited and not): the same hex value was shown in the developer tools.
Can you find out which of these links are visited:
This 'visited link' distinction appears to work in IE11 (which I don't normally use for browsing anything, but the corporate intranet), however, the choice of light grey for visited links is not a good solution.
Please, have some compassion for people (like me), who open this page after spending 14+ hours working! I am really embarrassed to mention again the topic of proper choice of colors - you don't need to be a professional designer to realize that this is wrong.
As to the search improvements and crawler optimization - I am still skeptical. Have a look at the example of your blog - it is still not properly indexed as a blog, 2 days after content creation. What is worse, we still did not get the sorting by date/relevance back.
I know how hard it can be to please users, but if I could see at least one actual site usability improvement, it would be easier not to lose hope after more than two months of encountering new and re-introduced bugs and very un-delightful experience.
Hi, Veselina:
Since I'm already looking into the color/question issue, I'll try to respond to your comments when I also respond to Jelena's points.
In addition, however, you noted some issues with search. I'll look into that separately.
Best regards,
--Jerry
Hi Veselina,
I'm passing along your comments on the search issues to the search team & I'll ask them to respond here.
Best,
Jamie
Thanks Jamie for sharing this with me.
Veselina,
Not all sources in search are crawled. Â Some, such as blogs, have a different solution. Â I tested this and the type meta data is not being sent on new posts so a bug ticket was created to fix this. Â Thanks for reporting this issue.
Let me take this opportunity to highlight a couple of other recent improvements.
– Autocompletes have been added: Just start typing a product or even an SAP board member name in search
–  Added and updated “Best Bets” or recommended results that appear at the top of search results for thousands of popular and relevant queries, such as the trending term “express”
– Begun applying some advanced result boosting rules: This is why the ABAP development topic page appears at the top of natural results for the query “ABAP” (Warning: Boosting is still in its infancy!)
We are also building out a new UI. Â Therefore, sorting by date/relevance will have to wait until this is delivered in the next quarter. Â In the meantime, content can be sorted via the available date filter.
Thanks,
Jason
Thank you, Jason, for the clarifications - now the improvements are much clearer.
Sadly, I think, that the autocomplete for board user names in your example worked because the member has a name starting with some fairly used SAP term - I tried with other names, including yours and Tammy's - nothing comes up in the type-ahead :). It could be that the feature takes time to start working properly, of course.
I think, best bets work only if you don't use 'exact' searches, which generally produce more relevant results, compared to the fuzzy option, but I could be wrong.
I hope that SAP is also working to improve the search logic in the result list for SAP search - I am one of the few, who prefer SAP search to Google in some cases. The search functionality has a great potential, but still needs some work.
The blog post is tagged as blogs again.
For auto complete, we do not include member names. Â Aside from any privacy concerns, community members aren't searched for heavily so the auto complete is focused on what people search for, which is often SAP product names and solutions.
Feel free to recommend a term for Best Bet and I'll be happy to compare it against the search logs to determine relevance.
Thanks,
Jason
Hi Veselina,
Thank you for your feedback on visited questions feature. I will share it with the relevant IT team.
Regards,
Moshe
Nice blog ?