Background
After the recent deadlines around data protection/privacy this site published ways to update your profile settings to allow you to continue participating.
There is a blog about this profile privacy setting with a link to YouTube video about Changing Your SAP Community Privacy Settings.
If you do not update your profile setting you will be known as a "Former Member" on your contributions.
I am a "Former Member" well I do(did) have an account which I was unable to alter the privacy settings since I lost access to the SAP-ID (I changed company). So for example one of my other blogs that covered this sites data (well actually when it was known as SCN) is now marked as Former Member. I will have to try out the information in Audrey's blog link below to see if I can rescue that account.
https://blogs.sap.com/2018/05/24/how-to-keep-that-old-profile-with-that-big-legacy-reputation-from-b...
An official page for the profile privacy setting is here
https://www.sap.com/community/about/profile-privacy.html
From my reading of this information to keep participating in the community (asking questions/writing blogs etc) then you need to have made your profile public. I have altered these settings on my main account I use for SAP Community which means I get to publish this blog :).
There have been a few posts I have read around this subject from a possible bug to a general syncing issue around this setting, so certain things may still be changing or will be updated at a later date. A selection of these links below.
https://answers.sap.com/questions/527996/possibly-bug-former-member-or-not.html
https://answers.sap.com/articles/524961/comments-as-former-member-is-this-a-potential-fall.html
https://blogs.sap.com/2018/05/24/update-slight-delay-for-processing-profile-privacy/
Prior to the data protection deadline and profile changes I had published my blog
(Unofficial) Analysis Of The Answers.sap.com Question Forums in which I analysed the publicly available data from this site in various ways.
My last update to that blog was to take a look at new members to this site and there activities in the question/answer forums. The new members I thought would be a good search to repeat after the privacy changes. A way to review how many of the new members are still to be found on the site. My thinking was that repeating a new member search would be a good indication to see how connected they are to the site (to gauge if they had seen the privacy setting updates/blogs/requirements)
By new member I mean a new account created after 10th Oct 2016 - the start of the new platform. As mentioned in my previous blogs a "new member" is not necessarily a brand new user, it could be a user with yet another SAP-ID registering or all those "team" accounts where more than one person as access etc.etc...
I use the SAP Cloud Platform to collect the data and combination of SQL Queries and old school Lumira 1.31 to analyse the data. I blogged my approach for this here and thanks to the SAP Cloud Platform.
Onto the actual analysis of this site. I have split the analysis into three sections
- People search - which is focused on new accounts between October 2016-March 2018
- Blog search - All blogs published between October 2016-March 2018
- Question search - All questions but a change of date range between Oct 2016 to 30th Apr 2017 to match my other blog
**Searching Answers - my second update to my original blog covered a way to analyse the actual answers to the questions. This relied on the AnswerHub API which was active at that time. As this API is now disabled I can't cover the "former member" issues with answers. As per the links at the start of my blog "former member" settings is/was an issue with the Answers.
People Search
My original data range was 10th Oct 2016 to 2nd March 2018 for the People Profile search and the chart looks like this.
The chart shows new accounts by created date
Search BEFORE The Privacy Update
The above chart does indicate an ongoing decline in new accounts since the change to the new platform. The high peak on the chart is the 27th November and rather odd number of training accounts created on this day. **an example screen shot below is from my original analysis I have not reviewed these accounts since the privacy setting changes.
The overall total was just over 90k new accounts
Searching AFTER Privacy Update
I used exactly the same code and range of data to see the impact of the Former Member setting and the results a big drop in the number of new users. Only approx 14k users can be found.
Blog Search
Out of a total blog count of 13336 in my data set and chosen date range there are 3563 blogs marked as Former Member
Question/Answer Forum Search
For the Answer Forum updated search, I am going to change my date range to align with my previous blog
https://blogs.sap.com/2017/05/19/unofficial-analysis-of-the-answers.sap.com-question-forums/
The date range for that blogs analysis was 10th Oct 2016 to 30th Apr 2017 and the total questions and Authors was as follows.
Search BEFORE The Privacy Update
The chart shows over 41k total questions by just over 23k unique user.ids.
Searching AFTER Privacy Update
My updated search (using my original code and date range) is as follows
To point out that maybe the total number of questions should be the same in both the above screenshots? However as covered in my original blog I did cover my process of "Validation Of Data And Missing/Deleted Questions" and the fact that over time questions do get deleted. However there is a big drop in the total number of authors. And no surprise (at this stage) that "Former Member" has the most questions...
I have done some random checks on my data and all these checks so far have passed and indicated I have valid data. I was surprised by the result, in that there is a big drop in unique user ids.
Participating As Former Member
During my initial analysis I did tweet the surprising (to me) results I had for the Answer search and Jim Spath replied to my tweet with an interesting question
They asked the question(s) before or after the 'formerization'? Just curious.
I didn't think I could answer that at the time but I wanted to review the data I had. I chose to determine the date the 14k users had been modified. (SAP search has "created","updated" and "modified" timestamps to filter searches). Dates for the privacy changes have been published in the official blogs/posts but I wanted to see what was in the dataset. The main modified date was 27th May, although the 4 modified profiles on the 20th May is valid data (and the profile links are searchable), however the profiles are actually hidden and result in 404 not found links??
I did sense check further into the 14k users and all those checks indicate active searchable profiles.
So I was curious to see how many questions and blogs were posted after the 27th May as "Former Member". In my understanding it should not be possible to participate as a Former Member.
There are no "former member" blogs to be found in my updated data set
For the Answers search I have found two former member questions
I checked both questions and found "former member" was displayed.
As mentioned at the start this could be some outstanding syncing issue or maybe the privacy profile setting was changed after asking the question.
That's the end of my blog and thanks for reading.
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