Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
The Summer Solstice has had cross-cultural significance throughout history. It's the moment that the earth's pole has its closest tilt to the sun, occurring in June in the northern hemisphere, and December in the southern hemisphere. For those of us in the north, it means that summer is in full swing, and the sun sets earlier with each passing day. So it's time to savor the warmth, enjoy your time outside, and have fun before it gets dark at four in the afternoon. The same can be said about the Alteryx Community - it's time to savor all the time you can!
Need to Know
Over the past month our development team has been making several updates across the community for both quality-of-life improvements and to get ready for larger projects coming down the pipeline.
In the quality-of-life department, we’ve made updates to our avatar upload, category submission and SSO functionalities. The user avatar functionality previously had a bug that made cropping uploaded pictures difficult at best, we’ve corrected this and now avatars can be cropped and updated without issue. The category level ‘Submit an Idea’ button would previously bring you to the correct posting page but not update the dropdown so you could pick where to post. We’ve fixed this issue and the dropdown will now properly populate. However, this dropdown will no longer be accessible after selecting the board you’d like to post in as you’ll be redirected to the appropriate questionnaire. Finally, our team has been making several updates to the backend functionality of SSO. The most prominent is that we have updated the behavior around the timer when a user is logged out. Users should now be able to stay logged in for much longer periods of time than before.
We’ve also included some new features on the community, primarily we have a new trial button that will link users to the Alteryx Designer trial page if they’re interested. This will only appear for logged out users though, so logged in users will not see this new prompt in the navigation.
The Data Science Portal navigation has also been streamlined to be more in sync with our main navigation. Users can check out the new navigation menu by selecting the Data Science Portal option just above the Community navigation.
Lastly, we have gotten a fair amount of feedback from users regarding our Subscription functionality. Specifically, that it creates a lot of spam, which basically results in the functionality to be useless. To correct this, we’re updating a small batch of default settings to help make this functionality more user friendly. We’re updating the defaults to only notify users who are subscribed on a board level for the first post on a board level. This means users who are subscribed will only receive emails for the starting post on a thread, a new blog, knowledge base article or event and no notifications for the comments unless they have elected into it via commenting on that thread, blog, knowledge article or event. This update will not impact the settings for users regarding receiving notifications for conversations they have engaged and opted into via having the ‘Email me when someone replies’ check box at to the right of the reply text box checked.
If you’d like to go back to the old subscription method however you can do so by going to your My Community Settings > Subscriptions & Notifications > Notification Settings. Once there, you can recheck the checkbox for ‘Any comments on the knowledge base articles, blog articles or events in boards I subscribe to’ and update the dropdown for the setting ‘For my forum subscriptions, notify me for’ to All Posts. Doing so will change your board subscriptions back to notifying you for all posts and comments.
We have several fun projects reaching their end stages, and I wanted to give a heads up on one. Our User Groups will be upgrade to a new back-end board type that will contain a bunch of new features and functionalities. However, in preparation for this we’ll need to put the user groups into maintenance for a period of time. We’ll let you know well in advance when this maintenance will occur, and while the User Group areas may be inaccessible for this maintenance, we will not be placing the whole community into maintenance.
Community News
Since we have so many updates on the community platform side of things this month we'll keep this part of the blog short and sweet, but there are a couple of things that you should definitely take note of, especially if you are multilingual!
We've launched two new interactive lessons in our Spanish and Portuguese communities. The first one is the Parsing Data Interactive Lesson in our Spanish community. The second is the Predictive Modeling Interactive Lesson available in Portuguese. Definitely give them a peek!
Additionally our localization team, responsible for providing language support for our products, wants to hear from you! If you use Alteryx in one of the 7 Non-English languages that we support or are a native speaker of one of the languages that we support but opt to use English instead we want to know! Take this 5 minute survey to let us know your thoughts, as it's a great opportunity to let the team know and have an effect on the products you use!
Read and Listen
June was an especially sporty month for our blogs, with posts getting us pumped about Euro 2020 and Formula 1 racing with Alteryx-sponsored McLaren. Also related to speed and navigation on the road: Learn more about drive-time optimization using Alteryx, and how spatial data can be used with Designer for what3words.
If you’re hanging out on social media to keep up on sports, sprinkle a little data science into your feeds. Be sure to check out our other hot data science topics from June: feature engineering, image processing and Python memory problems.
Just need to think about something that sounds cool (and is cool) during these hot summer days)? Read about Snowflake and hosted Designer trials, plus defining your own Snowflake functions with Alteryx.
Tune in to our June podcast episodes full of tips for transitioning from spreadsheets to an analytics program, putting AI ethics into practice, and multinational NLP collaboration in Africa. How cool is that?!
Final Thoughts
Much like the solstice, this edition of Highlights doesn't have a huge amount of time to hang around, there is a clear beginning and end. Though it has reached its end, I hope that it will have a lasting impact in your corner of the community. And as the days continue to shorten, enjoy all the minutes of sunshine that you can!
