Alteryx Community Ideas

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)

Hi there Alteryx team,

Firstly, thank you for the care that you put into nurturing and tending this community!

Looking at the badges - it seems that it may be useful to discriminate between posts made in the Ideas sections; vs. posts made in the discussion or the Weekly Challenge section.

My thinking here is that some folk will be able to make a huge contribution in new product or community ideas - while others may be assisting the community with solutions; suggestions; replies etc.   Both are valuable and both are very different ways to contribute.

:-) additionally - like you've done with the weekly challenges - we could make this fun (e.g. use light-bulb or invention-themed badge icons for folks who are prolific idea generators).

Thanks again for all you do

best

Sean

Hi there,

It would be helpful on the discussion boards to be able to filter in 2 specific ways:

- Filter for unsolved questions (so that folk can focus on helping people who are still looking for an answer without having to trawl through all the answered ones)

- Filter for only threads that have updates  (similar to an inbox - I only want to see new items so that every day I can keep up with the traffic without having to remember if I've read a particular post or not)

I apologise if these capabilities exist already - if they do exist, then perhaps I'll alter this suggestion to read "help to make these features easier to locate".

Many thanks

Sean

Hi there,

The login to the community goes through the Gallery - which is a problem for folks in locked-down corporate environments (in our firm, the gallery.alteryx.com URL is locked down so that there can be no leakage of intellectual property) - as a result, none of us can log into the community site (Community.alteryx.com) and sign in as ourselves from work.

Would it be possible to replicate the login URL so that if I'm logging in from the Community it punches me through to Community.alteryx.com/login instead of Gallery.alteryx.com?   You could use the same authentication and the same credentials in the background, but at least then we'd be able to log into the community from the office and contribute to questions and discussions?

Thank you

Sean

This is probably just the neat-freak inside of me but I've been noticing more an more Community posts that don't really belong where they are. Examples:

1. Someone poses a question in the wrong Discussion category.
2. Someone poses a Knowledge Base or Live Training style article as a Discussion.
3. Someone poses a question in the Ideas area.
4. Someone poses an idea for something that can already be done with Alteryx (something that should be moved to a Discussion)
5. Someone poses a discussion only to find out that there is no solution (something that should be moved to Ideas)

To help the moderators out, I think adding a "Suggest Move" option to the Options Menu on a post (pictured below) would be valuable.

When selecting this option a little window could pop up with a list of the different areas of the Community. The user would then select the one that they feel the post should be moved too. Moderators would then see all the suggested moves on a special screen and perform the move if they agree. Ideally, any hyperlinks to the moved post that exist within other posts on the community would be redirected.

The positive benefits of this would be:

• Making it easier to find content
• Refining the scope of Ideas Alteryx needs to consider
• Reducing the number of unanswered posts for people seeking to help solve others' discussions (there's a lot of Live Training posts that appear in the Unanswered Posts queue)

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.

I think it would be great if there was a knowledge base section(or something similar) for any user to post random workflows that they find useful and want to share/solicit feedback from the community. Several posts from the last few weeks would fit well in this new category and sparked the idea: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Setup-Configuration/Polling-a-directory-for-changed-files/m-p/51019 by @N___ or https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/An-API-Client-for-Alteryx-Gallery-in-R/m-p/49464... by @michael_treadwell. Instead of having these great workflows buried/mixed in with all the questions, it would great if there was a single spot for people to post various workflows back to the community and get comments/feedback/enhancements from fellow community members. I think many more people would be open to sharing and commenting on posts like this if they had a spot to post them that is separate from all the Q&A style spots.

I am proficient in SQL and new to Alteryx; I see the answer to many of problems quite easily through the SQL language but want to know how to translate much of that to Optimal Alteryx workflows and would if there are alternative approach to the same thing in Alteryx I like to be able choose the path that is most compatible with my Alteryx skill set at the time eg take the path using an Alteryx Tool; a Function, RegEx or other.

Examples: 

- How would perform the equivalent of a GROUP BY and HAVING Clause 

SELECT A, Count(*)
FROM TABLE
GROUP BY A
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1

- How would I perform the Teradata SQL equivalent of QUALIFY, RANK, ROWNUM and PARTITION BY

- How would I assign a PRIMARY INDEX upon creation of a table using the Alteryx output without having to create the table myself using SQL on Teradata itself (this is necessary to mitigate unnecessary storage usage resulting from skew)

It would be very convenient if there was a button on posts (for the post author only) that would allow the author to auto re-post the question as a suggestion/feature request if it has gone unanswered for (2? 3?) days.

Probably not just a single click and done, but at least take the content and open a draft in the feature suggestion section.

Hi @JulieH (et al),

What's the social conversation going on right now about #alteryx (or other followed hashtags)?  We can see who's logged into the community, but what about a feed of the greater social universe?  Could we integrate a twitter feed into the community?

Along with that, maybe users would want to have instant messaging to the public (contained within the community) as a lighter form of posts.

Just a few related ideas.

Cheers,

Mark

Would love to have more flexibility to filter and/or sort the community discussions. It would be great to filter to just unsolved questions or unanswered questions etc...

downloads.alteryx.com works well  --> but download.alteryx.com returns an error...

drivers.alteryx.com works --> but driver.alteryx.com

gallery.alteryx.com is ok, sometimes crashed when demoing to clients though ;) -->galleries.alteryx.com nada...

forums.alteryx.com --> forum.alteryx.com doesn't respond

I would also add;

designer.alteryx.com

server.alteryx.com

partners.alteryx.com

customers.alteryx.com for easier access...

A list of subdomainz

Subdomain IP address

This is a minor thing, but it's kind of funny so I thought i'd post on it. Ever use the spell checker when typing posts or replies? It thinks that "workflow" is a misspelled word. Please add "workflow" to the Community spell checker's dictionary!

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.

TWIMC, 

Our team loves the weekly exercises and value the lessons learned-- or should I say earned--  from them each week. However, finding them is a little, well, weird especially when I am trying to explain how to find them to colleagues: "Well, so, you go to search, type weekly and then select results from the last week and then each of the previous weeks exercises will be held in that most recent workbook. " What I would love to see is these in their own space within the community so one would not have to search for them each week. Bonus points if we were able to DL all workbooks as a single zip that we could have for new-hire training material! 

Cheers, 

John