First time users get best practices information before posting first question

[IraWatt]

Very often first time questioners post questions in formats which make it hard to answer. For instance. posting a question with no context about the data they are using or using an screenshot which the community will then have to manually type up themselves to answer the question. In this case if users could be pre prompted to add a copy and paste table beforehand it will allow the community to more quickly answer and understand new users questions.

[WillM]

@IraWatt thanks for your idea!  We do push people to several onboarding resources when the join the Alteryx Community, but currently don't have a mechanism to drive them to this upon posting. Our docket is fairly full on enhancements for the short term so I'm moving this to Revisit so that we can take a look at a future date.

[SeanAdams]

Hey Ira - I can't agree more - and that's what led to this blog post:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-Resources/Posting-for-Fastest-Possible-Solution/t...

Perhaps you have other ideas, and we can talk about whether it's time to update and refresh this doc?

[DataNath]

Love this idea @IraWatt, coincidentally came over here to make one regarding this!

I think it’d perhaps be worth trialling something simple like a pop-up with a tick box when posting which prompts you to agree that - if applicable - you’ve provided sample data that is truly representative of your issue/question/working data set. The post could then be labelled as containing attachments/mock data or something. Obviously this doesn’t apply to all cases - there are some posts that are just general discussions or people fielding ideas etc, so there could be a few boxes to address those kind of topics which will add appropriate labels automatically.

As another point, I think it’d be great if we could add suggestions into something like a prompt as mentioned above. I’d say 90% of threads are super common requests that could’ve been found with a bit of searching and there’s also often identical threads recommended on the side of the topic itself! So why not suggest these to the user before they even post?

Neither of these are fully fleshed out ideas but just a few thoughts I had!

[IraWatt]

@DataNath I 100% agree with your points. Its strange as when you post an idea you are prompted with similar posts but not with discussions. Just checked your blog @SeanAdams, it should be mandatory reading on the community 😅, its too easy to not see the community resources blogs.