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.

I am meeting a lot of awesome people at #Inspire17!! ...but when I went to try and find some of them on the Community, I realize there is no easy way to do this. How cool would it be for there to be a User or People section on the Community where you could find people by querying their public stats (or even private stats if the user checks something saying to make those stats public)?! This feature could help tremendously with networking! Here's some situations where something like this would help:

"I remember this guy worked for x-company, if only I could see their name, I would know who it is"

"I want to connect with other Alteryx users near me"

"I want to reach out to this presenter from Inspire17, but I forgot what their Community Username was"

Hi there

(cc @AshleyK ; @JoshH ; @BenG ; @LDuane ; @JulieH )

Looking at the ideas board for the Alteryx Product Ideas - it's clear that these ideas are not being processed by the product teams.   76% of all the ideas logged are still in "New" state, with 1033 unique ideas out there which have not yet been moved into a state which would indicate any sort of consideration.

Is there anything that we as a community can do to help?

Note: Many of these ideas point to similar issues, so with some curation this number can be brought down significantly.

Thank you

Sean

What do you think about an area in the community for people to look for talent or offer their talent. If we had that, I can tell you right now it would be my first stop before any job search or recruiting sites.

@LeahK,

How about having a page dedicated to the Grand Prix?  It could include a virtual trophy and bios of the winners (even the participants).  It might also be interesting to have links to the actual problems that they had to solve and potentially even have the data too for download.  Videos of the winning experiences would be a bonus.

Cheers,

Mark

Not sure if this is intentional, but can we get the date that something was uploaded to the public Gallery to show up as our default date display format configured in our Community settings?

Currently I have my date settings:

but Gallery uploads still appear (DD/MM/YYYY):

June 4th 2022 definitely hasn't happened yet.

maybe the monthly update could include counts of newly certified community members in the monthly post? 

Cheers,

Mark

To make it easier to find the latest download for Alteryx... it was easy when it was downloads.alteryx.com but then it changed to licenses.alteryx.com and I wasted some time trying to find a way to get to it. It could also just be a link under Getting Started or Alteryx Resources, I know it's out there as a link somewhere but more a more visible and prominent option would be nice. Something like my wonderful artist rendition below:

It would be nice if we could present the Community Private Messages board into a in more conversation style layout (something like Outlook or Gmail).

Currently, Received and Sent messages are stand-alone pages, and it gets difficult to refer back to a previous message in a given thread without opening them in a new browser tab.

It would be nice to have a Community format that is also geared toward sharing custom Macros and Workflow solutions as a way to give back to the Alteryx Community, rather than base the entire interaction on question / problem posting and offering solutions. I use Alteryx mostly on the software development side, so most of my solutions have to be more dynamic and universal. Most of us don't have time to stay on top of all of the new question posts and help users with "one off" workflow challenges, so it would be great for us to have a place to share some dynamic custom macros / solutions / tools that could save people a ton o f hassle and time.

Something along the lines of sharing "Use Cases" in combination with some custom dynamic workflow / macro solutions. I have tried to share things in the past and the Community structure is completely geared toward Q & A.

Many (all?) of the dates used in the community site are following the US date format, i.e. MM-DD-YYYY. However, in many places around the world, the standard date format is DD-MM-YYYY. Being a 'crossover' from Oz to US, I'm aware of the difference, but many will not be.

Could we use a more obvious format that makes it clear to both sides? I find the YYYY-MM-DD to work well for this purpose, as well as for sorting. But there are other formats that could work, e.g. DD-MMM-YYYY or MMM DD, YYYY.

Alteryx has to make a lot of little decisions that have a big impact on users such as...

• What should the default data type be in the new Formula tool?
• Where in the menu should Manage Data Connections Be?
• Should the Comment tool be single or double click before you start typing?

Rather than Alteryx making those decisions, why not let the Community decide! A new polls section would allow the users to ultimately determine the look and feel of certain things in the Designer and make other contributions to the future of Alteryx.

If this is done, please make it a separate section (not a subset under discussions) so the purpose and impact are clear.

With the growing popularity of Alteryx challenges, the new topics gets lots of "noise" as challenge posts are made.  Could we either filter these messages to their own tab (for those interested in the real-time updates of challenge solution posts) or just remove them from notifications?  When you're logged-in to the community, you get lots of these messages.

Cheers,

Mark

The Alteryx community serves many people across many continents.  When a user posts a comment or wants to read a post, there should be an option to "Translate" the post to their preferred language.

Cheers,

Mark

Could we add a DATA category so we can share links to different (open source) datasets? For example, it took me a while to find a RELIABLE source for past US election data and other Alteryx users may benefit from it.

2012 federal election results:

http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.shtml

or past elections:

http://www.fec.gov/general/library.shtml

or shapefiles containing county polygons with results for 2012/2008:

http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?metadata_type=geospatial&_metadata_type_limit=0&q=Elections

I really like the new Community design and I think that splitting discussion by product is a fantastic way to direct users.

I would like one more page, that functions similarly to the designer/server/promote pages, which have links to discussion, knowledge base, and ideas.

Ideally, this page would have a link/button that would bring you to each of the ideas pages for the various products, so eg:

User clicks a "Idea Center" link.

Here there are 5 links:
Community Ideas
Connect Ideas

Designer Ideas

Server Ideas

Promote Ideas

Each of these links is basically identical to the ones that already exist today (maybe the icon changes to be a lightbulb and the image for that particular product?)

That way it is easy to navigate specifically to suggestions, which I think will be helpful for ease of access.

I see I can go month by month but takes quite a bit of time. The weekly challenge index is very helpful and useful :) 

Maybe this is just a "temporary" badge, but I had the thought that as we register for Inspire18, that we could earn a registration badge.  You could see who's coming to inspire and communicate beforehand.  Similarly, if I see a post from someone that isn't registered I could suggest a session for them.

Cheers,

Mark