Gallery on Community - Long Term Best Practise and Maintenance

[TheOC]

Hi all,
I just wanted to raise a potential discussion piece (and my ideas) around best practice and maintenance of the Gallery on the Community.

For context - currently, anyone at all can upload a workflow, consisting of anything at all.

This is fantastic in many senses. Not having to jump through hoops to be able to upload workflows means that there is so much more information being shared, and besides, anyone can post a comment on the discussion boards with an attachment, so it makes sense for them to have the same accessibility for the Gallery.

However, a subsequent issue exists of the same nature. Allowing anyone to create and upload tools creates an environment that can make it hard to find a specific tool you need, or browse for what you like due to potentially low quality or 'example' workflows being uploaded - especially with the Gallery being defaulted to sorting by most recently added. Thankfully, there are a low percentage of the current listings on the Gallery that I would consider spam/low quality, however, I suspect this percentage to increase over time. There are a couple of examples of 'examples' here:

• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/test/ta-p/887539
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Test-Dynamic-Filter-and-Sort/ta-p/886938 
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/SFCU-Test/ta-p/887917 
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Dummy/ta-p/973278
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Axtria/ta-p/973480
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Example/ta-p/954363

I have also noticed a couple of weekly challenge answers uploaded to the Community.

From my perspective, there are a few ways of reducing the number of these uploads (and increasing the overall quality of the Gallery):

1. Allow for only 'verified' users to upload to the Gallery. Verified being either only those that apply to be an 'artisan' of the public gallery, or enrol/complete a training module on using the Alteryx Gallery. 
2. Have workflows and Apps go through a verification stage prior to upload, where they are checked by either Alteryx Community Team members or Alteryx Aces. A similar (but not exactly the same) thing has been suggested by @grossal here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-Ideas/Gallery-Add-Category-for-Alteryx-ACEs-amp-q...
3. Add an additional option on an Gallery listing to 'flag as spam'
   

   
   I am aware that we have the option to notify moderator, however this seems more suited for 'dangerous' elements of the Community, rather than spam posts.

4. Change the default sorting of tolls to be by likes.

Personally, and without getting too comfortable in volunteering others (I'm more than happy to assist with this process myself), I believe option 2 to be the most suitable. If this option is viable, this would not only remove 'spam' posts, but also tools that are broken or require work before release as an additional benefit. I am aware this would create extra work for the Community/Ace Team, so decided to do a quick scrape and found that the number of new posts each month has been decreasing (on average):

Meaning hopefully the number of uploads currently being faced are achievable within a team to validate. 

I believe this to be something worth considering a year in review of the Gallery, as we are able to consider best practice now for the longer term future of the gallery. An idea such as this would be much harder to implement another year into usage.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on long term maintenance of the Alteryx Gallery. It really is a great resource, but I hope it does not become a needle in a spam haystack situation. 

Cheers,

TheOC

P.S if anyone is interested in the yxdb scrape of all the current Gallery listings, I've attached it below.

AlteryxGalleryScrape.yxdb

[DataNath]

Definitely support this one! The gallery is great for allowing easy sharing of what can be very useful and powerful tools. However, although they're not malicious, the clutter from people misusing the space is a little annoying at times. Only thing I'd definitely not support from the post is default sorting by likes - new uploads would automatically be pushed to the bottom and out of sight.

[WillM]

Hey @TheOC!  Thanks so much for your idea!  This is something that we've noticed as well, and have recently implemented stricter moderation checks on Gallery and have been actively removing posts (though we are still working through some at this time). 

If you see posts that shouldn't be in the Gallery, please click "Notify Moderator" and we will address it individually. This would be similar to your idea of "Flag as Spam" as another option - it will go to our moderation queue and will allow us to act accordingly.

We won't be implementing a vetting system, but with these new enhancements to the process, I'm going to mark this as Implemented since it should help alleviate the issue.