Alteryx Community Ideas

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.

Hi all

Just a quick suggestion from me regarding the Gallery on Community, it would be great if when adding a tool to the community, we can label them as 'Base A'. Of course, this relies on a level of trust from users to tag their workflows, however, for many users, it can be more reassuring, or useful from a learning perspective to be able to know which tools only contain Alteryx-based tools.

My idea is that this is just an additional label in the uploading of a tool/workflow process, as seen below (spoofed with inspect element):

Kind Regards,
TheOC

In the non-English communities, we miss the "Videos" section. That option would make it easier for people who do not speak English to find videos in their native language to learn from.

In the Portuguese community, for example, we had to create a workaround by publishing videos on the blog and creating a single fixed post indexing all videos because we didn't have an easy way to find them.

Getting to grips with building tools with the SDK can be quite challenging with multiple sources of information from the Github page to the help docs. A single straight forward video tutorial series on the community would be awesome.

Hello!
Currently there are a couple of banners on the Alteryx Community with information for users:

However, even if i dismiss/click the cross on both of these, they reappear if i navigate to another area of the community. It would be nice to remember that the user has dismissed them, and have them not pop up again. Otherwise, it may be worth removing the 'x', however i would prefer the former.

Thanks,
TheOC

Hello!

I am glad that all new tools are in one place under the Community Gallery now, and I have also noticed some Alteryx connectors have been moved out of Designer and into Gallery as a separate install. This is great for a lot of users who care about the speed of installation and size of storage on their machine.

However, as someone happy to spend time installing Alteryx tools, and no real limitation on drive space, it would be awesome to be able to download all Alteryx and Ace tools at once. I would think this would work best as two separate macro packs, downloadable from either the Gallery or the download portal, with all of the tools created by Alteryx and the Aces.

I think this would extend my functionality of Alteryx as I would have access to many of the Alteryx tools much easier. 

Thanks,
TheOC

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.

I've noticed that a fair few community members who have a standard sign off on most of there posts, usually consisting of contact and business details. It would be nice UX feature to be able to set a default sign off/signatures to replies and posts much the same as can be done with email. 

I'm completing sections of the Alteryx Academy and see the 100% progress bar, but it would be great to have a link where we can see and download all our completed courses in a transcript form. We could provide it to our leadership as a way for them to measure growth in our skills, or bring it to interviews along with our resumes, etc.

We all loved the District section of the old Gallery, it was the single most important page of the old Gallery as it was allowing to quickly find high quality tools, no matter if built by Alteryx or Community.

In the current Gallery we are completely missing the categories for Alteryx built macros / connectors / tools, as well as we don't have a category for ACE-built tools. Right now, the Gallery is still in it's early days, but it's already hard to find the things that we are looking for. I often reference Gallery-Macros in the training and customer sessions. In the past I knew where to send the people (Districts Page), nowadays I don't. There is no single page that shows what is really important and quality proven. 

I like that we are able to tag what we upload, but there is no way to differentiate from quality builds and "others". I don't want to call people out here.

Take a look at the following page:

I'm sure that's amazing content and has its right to stay on the Gallery, but I'm pretty sure we aren't searching for this or shall we upload all our exercises and weekly challenges to the new Gallery?

We need:

- Alteryx Category

- ACE Category

- Quality Content flag

Theoretically there is the following (hidden) option - but it's only available on sub-pages.

And it's not really well maintained from what we can see. Let's take a look what's supported by Alteryx in the Automation Category:

And now let's take a look at the full page:

Alteryx has a technology alliance with Blueprism -  shouldn't we trust their content? The official Blue Prism Connector is not supported by Alteryx? And their macro as well. How shall I explain to my customers that these are "semi-official" (because not part of core-product) tools if they aren't even flagged as Alteryx-supported?

There are many more examples where even Macros from the AlteryxProducts account are not flagged as supported by Alteryx (e.g. Runner macro). 

There needs to be a single page that shows all high-quality builds, as well as we need a page for all Alteryx / ACE tools to make it easier for everyone.

Best

Alex

Non English communities lack of a link to the Gallery.

Please add the link.

Thanks

I would like to be notified when somebody posts something new to the gallery. I can't find the button to do that if it already exists.

Hi @WillM and Community-Team,

today I went to the ideas section and wanted to look if someone already posted tool improvements for the 'Test'-Tool. Therefore I used the Search and tried to narrow the results like this:

While the first look is promising, most of the posts do not talk about the Test-Tool itself, but other tools/improvements.

Would it be possible to add another label "Tools" to actually select the exact tool(s) that we are referencing in the posts? This would also be an amazing feature for developers / product managers to see which tools get the most ideas, summed up likes, etc.

I'd be willing to help categorize all 3000-4000 ideas that we currently have in the Designer Ideas section to get all old ideas categorized appropriately*. For all new posts, the community manager that checks / comments the idea, should check if the users added this himself or if not, add it. If this is too much work, I'd also be willing to help categorize new ideas on a weekly basis. 

*Other ACEs might as well help categorize, but if not, I don't mind spending a weekend to get this right.

Note: It has too be a label, that allows to select 0-n tools, because not all posts talk about tool improvements, but others talk about multiple. Because of the zero possibility, this has to be a non-mandatory field.

Best

Alex

I think it would be great to have Grand Prix style event once a quarter for the weekly challenges. This can be broken down by expertise level. I see this increasing the engagement on the community and further spread the word on weekly challenges. Also, not everyone  makes it on stage for Grand Prix, this event could be their opportunity to experience Grand Prix

As of right now, at the end of every interactive lesson and learning path, we have a quiz that is not more than 5 questions. To further solidify the learning, I think it would be a great value add if we can add a challenge (just like the weekly challenges) at the end of every 3 or 4 interactive lessons or learning path. The idea is to solve the challenge using everything we learnt from those lessons.

Problem:  We are finding many discussion posts solutions that either are exactly the same as a previous solution on the same question or slightly different and in addition they are being marked as solutions. This doesn't help the community if there is no premium on either expanding significantly on the previous answer or answering completely differently but also correctly. Users are being rewarded on just posting an answer not on posting a thoughtful, useful, and correct answer.

Solution: Stack overflow as an example handles this quite nicely in that they offer many different responses but also with the ability to upvote OR downvote a response. This would radically improve the responses along with the metrics that guide many other programs in play on the community.

Hi,

When trying to help someone on the Community, answer may differ depending on installed version.

It could be useful to know display -if agreed- the product(s) and version(s) owned by someone to make interactions more efficient. Example: files for Python tool would not be placed in the same folders depending on the version.

Pros:

- Helps with providing answers adapted to user's context

Cons:

- If user upgrades her/his version then post will lose its context

Thanks,

PaulN

First of all, I want to say that I am very much enjoying the Academy Interactive Lessons. I would like to request that, upon completion of a lesson, the icons for the tools used in the lesson be added to the tile for quick visual reference. It seems simple in the example below, but would be helpful in the later lessons that use 2+ tools to execute actions.

First off, want to thank Alteryx for the nice AfG gesture. I believe there would be a LOT of people that want to take advantage of it globally. To that end, it would be great to have a Introduce yourselves section/thread where people can go and say hello. I have engaged in some online learning (both MOOC and otherwise) and any class where people get to know each other automatically becomes more engaging. You already have a lot of social elements built-in (photo, cool "rank" names and such) but no social kick-off. This thread could potentially be it!