Alteryx Community Ideas

right now if someone wants to change their e-mail subscription to a particular board, they need to scroll through the subscriptions on every item ever posted to get there:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-subscriptions%3Aemail-subscriptions

Could we add a quick filter to this subscriptions page to allow someone quickly to get to board or knowledge base subscriptions (i.e. filter out the topics and ideas and articles that have been auto-subscribed by replying).

Thank you

Sean

So - one of the common things that I do almost every few days - is to pass on an article on the community to someone who I work with.  

Right now - the only way to do this is to share it using the share button (which then goes via e-mail or twitter etc) or otherwise create a personal message, or even worse you can do a reply with "plus person XXX" but this just creates noise on the thread

Could we add 3 features to the community to make this MUCH quicker:

- Share with community user/group of users

- Allow me to create my own group of users like "Admin team" or "Designer users" or "my direct team" which I can forward the message to

- create a notification in the notification section for shared articles

This would make sharing content MUCH faster.

Hey there,

Please forgive me if I'm the only one who works like this - but one of my standard processes with the alteryx community is to frequently scan new posts, and then make a note to come back to the ones that either I want to respond to; or spend learning time on etc.

The way I currently do this is to take the URL, and pop it into Google Keep - I have 3 google Keep lists:

- One for Learning

- One for community stuff (general responses)

- one for my immediate priorities (generally stuff that I owe someone a personal response on).

Not sure if anyone else would find this useful, but i'd really value the ability to do this within the alteryx community site itself.  What I'm thinking of is:

a) mark a topic as "Add to list" and then like on the Amazon Wishlist I can select which list

b) I can then print out a digest of the posts that are in a particular list for reading on the train / car / flight etc

c) this list becomes my 3rd notfication list then - currently we have notifications for alerts; personal messages - we can then add this as a 3rd item.

Essentially this could work like youtube "Save for later".

Anyone else find this useful - if so, give it ia star :=_

Happy Wednesday

Sean

Sometimes we end up posting duplicate replies. There is no way to delete it. The only option is to now remove all the contents and post an empty reply.

It happened to me today:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Weekly-Challenge/Challenge-77-Extending-Spatial-Lines/m-p/71679#M13...

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"

Currently the only way that a thread can be closed on the discussion boards is if it's solved, however there are several cases where it cannot be solved because it's identified a defect, or something that would be an idea for the product.

In these cases, can we have an option to close this thread (so that folk can see it's done) even if it's not solved with a different closure indicator?

I can think of a few:

- Transfer to idea

- Transfer to defect/bug

- Abandoned

Hi there,

In the community we have the concept of user ranks ( @JulieH published the launch notes her: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-Alteryx-Community/User-Ranks-FAQs/td-p/10 ), and we also have the idea of community roles (e.g. Alteryx Partner; Chief Technology Officer; etc)

Could we separate these out into two different fields?   reason for asking is that folk like @MarqueeCrew and @jdunkerley79 have worked hard for their Magnetar rank, but because Mark is also a partner this is now hidden (because it's overridden with his partner status).    It would be good to see the entire community ranked with the user ranking system, irrespective of role - and then the role provides different privileges and permissions and may be a tuple (e.g. Mark could be an "Alteryx Partner" as well as "Alteryx Ace" as well as "Alteryx Community Super" - James could be "ACE"; "Lead formula innovator" and "Alteryx Community Super")

How is Alteryx a spelling error on the Community? Can we adjust it?

It would be great if we could have a feature in the community where I can recommend an article to a friend or colleague from within the site.

If we wanted to make this really fun, you could even reward people who bring new folk into the community - you get credit for every new joiner, only after they graduate beyond a certain user level (e.g. Atom or Meteor), and the credit belongs to the first person who sent them a recommendation?

We already have one of the best communities out there, the question is how do we get better at telling more people about it!

Oh no:

• we had a Valentines day badge, and a st Patricks day, and a haloween day, but no "Star wars Day" badge?  This seems to me to be one of the most important days on the calendar
• we missed Yuri's night on April 12th too :  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri%27s_Night
• I believe we also missed 10th March, which is both "International awesomeness day" and also Chuck Norris's birthday.   

We have to start thinking for 2018 how we can appropriately make a fuss of these important days. We should ask ourselves "what would Chuck do"?

Don't worry though - we still have time to plan for International CAPS LOCK day, which is held twice per year on June 28th, and Oct 22nd.  THAT IS FANTASTIC YEARLY EVENT (JUST GETTING IN SOME PRACTICE)!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caps_lock#International_Caps_Lock_Day

Hey all,

One of the areas that may be lacking in content a little is the server / admin side.   I may have missed this, but it seems like there are very few (if any) challenges or contests for the folk who do look after the Alteryx Server to sharpen their skills.

This is an area that I'd like to learn too - both to grow my own personal skill, but also to be of assistance for these sorts of questions.

Would there be a way that we could create a focus area around Server; and also a way for community members to download and install Server at home to learn?   We could severely limit this version (e.g. the learning version only allows 5 live workflows) to prevent people making a commercial operation, but still make the full capability available so people can learn this key part of the puzzle?

Thank you

Sean

Hi all,

@Joe_Makopointed out to me yesterday by a PM that the export & package tool for Alteryx has a known defect, where the nested macros (a macro inside a macro) don't export properly.

That set me thinking - what's the best way for the community to log defects, and I'm wondering if there's a place for a section on this forum for defect reports?   That would also make it easier for the Alteryx team to parse out defects (which folk like @Ned care very deeply about) from other types of posting.

This would have to be heavily curated though - in my experience, a large number of defects raised for systems I've managed over the years have not been defects, but actually users not understanding the tools - however these did give us very valuable insight into usability; training; etc.

So -  if we had a "Potential defects" section, and if the more senior members of the community had the ability to curate along with alterxy, we should be able to do something good here:

Curate actions needed:

- move some to "Ideas" if they are new functionality

- move some to one of the discussions thread if they are actually a usage question

- Escalate some to the technical leads at Alteryx

- the alteryx team could workflow them in the same way as the ideas but with an additional step of "replicatable example pending from user"

Let me know what you think?

Hi all,

In working through older posts, it's apparent that many have been orphaned by the author who may no-longer visit the Alteryx community site.

To check this - could we add "last logged in date" to the user's profile card (screenshot below)?   That would make it very easy to see if we should follow up with the user to progress to a solution, or just close the thread.

Cheers

Sean

Hi all,

Reading through the product ideas raised by the community - it strikes me that there are significant clusters.   Two jump out - improvements to date/time handling & parsing, and caching.

This is not a suggestion about either of these topics, but a question about how we look at and structure these ideas.   Let's take the date-time ones (full list is below) as a worked example:

- there are 23 distinct ideas (or 22 if you exclude the one about generating random dates) which relate to the treatment (mainly parsing; formatting or constructing) of dates & times

- None of these individually has enough votes to get them onto the "hot ideas" list - however when you look in aggregate across them, the theme of "standardizing and enriching date-time processing" is probably one of the hottest topics at the moment.

Two suggestions:

Tagging: If we are able to spot these patterns - and then create a tag that is related to this (in this case "DateTime handling") - the product team would probably be able to do some pretty interesting analytics.

Grouping: In order to allow people to spot these BEFORE they log the next idea which is trying to achieve the same thing - is it worth the community creating a grouped-up idea which then becomes persistent if there is a clear trend; and we can link out to these ideas?   For example an idea saying "standardize & Enrich treatment of date time", which then becomes a sticky item at the top of the forum so that folks don't have to search for pages to see if their idea is a duplicate.

NOTE: this second one (grouping) will also save time for the product team because they won't have to spend as much time flagging duplicates...

Hope this makes sense - as always, happy to help in thinking about potential solutions.

Note: the 23 ideas related to date-time treatment are captured below (as a worked example), and the authors of these ideas have been tagged out of courtesy

@DultonM @braxtone @Philip @AshokBhatt @CSchrader @dawid_nawrot @jdunkerley79 @Joe_Lipski @ChadB @nicholas_carstens @GGuenther @AndrewW @RachelW

Hi @LeahK

To really power the cleanup - what would be tremendously helpful is data on unsolved problems.

I think that this could take 2 forms:

a) a table format (like @JoeM does for the weekly exercises) - this would be fairly trivial to auto-generate this from the underlying data rather than hand-crafting - and can include links directly to the unsolved item

b) a grouped data structure, where we could see a few things:

      - Unsolved items by requestor (that allows us to group and target the biggest populations first)

      - some indicator of whether this requestor is still active in logging into the community (no point in chasing someone that hasn't logged in since 2013)

      - Links directly to the thread item

      - Last post date on the thread (no point in chasing someone to mark this as solved if it just happened 2 days ago)

That would enable us to go through the full population and more effectively work on getting the remaining items marked as solved or closed - and it would also allow us to track our progress as a metric of success day-by-day!

:-) I feel a data-driven-cleanup-project coming on - with as-of snapshots; trend graphs etc.   Very exciting stuff!

Hi @LeahK,

On our profile pic (top right) there is a very simple marker that shows if you have new messages or notifications.

Can we implement something similar for the other areas on the left hand panel?

- if there are new items in the discussions, then put a green circle with a number in indicating the count

- Same for Knowledge

- same for training; blogs; events etc.

This would be MASSIVELY helpful because that would allow everyone to see on a simple scan if there's new content out there without having to trawl into each section one by one to find new stuff.

NOTE: if we wanted to really make this uber-cool, for the discussion areas, users would be able to say "only count unsolved (or only new unsolved) discussion treads in my notification counter".   That way, people like the top solution hounds (listed below) could be in and solving problems in seconds.

Top solution authors copied: (based on https://community.alteryx.com/t5/solutions/acceptedsolutionsleaderboardpage/node-display-id/board%3A...)

@MarqueeCrew @jdunkerley79  @JohnJPS @michael_treadwell @patrick_digan @pcatterson @Joe_Mako @DataBlender @s_pichaipillai @Federica_FF @chris_love @tom_montpool @jack_morgan @kane_glendenning @Bob_Blackey @alex @danielbrun2 @DultonM @dataMack @Kanderson

Hi @LeahK

On of the challenges with the discussion board is that every-so-often you come across one like this:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Salesforce-Output-Dreaded-INVALID-FIELD-e...

or like this

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Can-the-Drive-Distance-Tool-output-a-rout...

Where this may be beyond the technical ability of the community team, and really needs someone from within the Alteryx Dev team who knows the internals of the tool to provide a technical response.   

However - unlike the "meet the community" post - there's no similar idea for the technical folk so we don't know where to send these.

I don't think that relying on you and your team to spot these kind of items is a workable / scalable answer either - there's just too many posts on the fora for you to read every one and make this kind of determination.

I can think of three ways to address this:

a) create a similar post for "meet the tech team" to identify 4 or 5 technical people who are willing to jump onto these more technical items (like MattD; Chad; Sophia / Sofia), and then when we come across these one of us can just tag the relevant technical person onto the thread.

b) we add this to the new functionality that you're thinking about under "report content" - we add another option called "escalate to technical folk"

c) we create a generic @ sign for something like @TechnicalTeamNeeded where when we spot one of these, we can then just reply and tag the technical team, which would put this into the right people's queues.

The vast majority of questions and issues can be solved by the community, so I'm keen that whatever solution we come up with doesn't deluge your technical folk - but at the same time it's important that we create a channel for the small subset that need extra assistance, to be able to get these into the right hands without your tech teams having to trawl through hundreds of community posts daily.

Hi there,

On several of the challenges, we are limited from attaching exported solutions (it only allows workflow files).    Additionally - it would be helpful to be able to attach flows & data files to PMs and to replies on ideas to avoid having to use drop-box etc.

could we change the settings on these discussion threads and on the PM area to allow this?

many thanks

Sean

Hey @LeahK

you mentioned in your post here (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-News/Alteryx-Community-Top-Contributors-March-201...) just how important it is to mark things as "solution" once they are solved so that people know a good solution to the problem (similar to StackOverflow)

However, I've been trawling through the discussion boards, and there's loads of old stuff out there that has not been marked.

I think that there's two relatively simple things we can do on this:

- Give people quickfilters (like you do on the ideas discussion board to see what's on the roadmap etc) to target problems that are unsolved.  This will allow the solution hounds in the community (see the top 10 list below) the ability to quickly target any spare time to focus on providing solutions.    Note - I'm pretty certain that there is a huge community of people providing solutions, but they are not getting the credit 'cause folks are not marking their original request as "solved"

- Additionally - we need the ability to clean up - I was trawling through the older ones, and there's items out there from 2012 where I'm pretty sure that the requestor is no-longer checking for updates on this thread.   We can do 2 things here:

     - the community can request that people mark these as solved if they are solved (the solution hounds can chase this)

     - we also need the ability to mark a solution if the original poster does not - almost like a community vote like Stack Overflow does - again, this will allow the solution hounds and to assist with cleaning up the backlog, and will also make the data in this community more valuable.   

     - Finally - some things cannot be solved - we need to mark these as "closed but not solved" in some way.    For example - I could easily post something saying "please let me know how to get Alteryx to automatically change variables through the workflow when I change them".    This is on the idea board (and on the roadmap I believe), but not currently solved.   Can we have a way of either marking these as "Closed" or "Closed as new product idea - moved to idea board" and then create an idea-board insert for this?

I think that this would really help in cleaning up the backlog of items on the discussion forum which are years old and still looking like pending discussions!

Thank you 

Sean

Top 10 solution hounds (people with accepted solutions) across the 4 discussion areas as of 09 Apr 2017

( @MarqueeCrew @alex @patrick_digan @Bob_Blackey @pcatterson @Garrett @Kanderson @jlefeaux @JohnJPS @ThizViz @Claje @Abiswal86 @munirsalim @mbarone @msbs48 @AmandaMS @patrick_mcauliffe @ShannonH @rpaugh @bsharbo @tlisti @jdunkerley79 @Evie @DavidVonka @dev_raut @brendafos @toddhowl @oliver_huber just to take the top 10 from the various boards)