Ask/Getting Started from old to new?

English
#8

@guilhem , thank you for your reply.

There is also Guidelines for asking. I believe pinned topics such as these would have more visibility compared to pages on external sites.

I looked at the links you mentioned and to me they don’t seem suitable.
If you really wanted to open a topic, IMHO it should be called “How to use the Ask page”.
After all, the point is to describe the individual options for this page and for Q&A and to supplement them with pictures.

Why not simply importing the content into About the English category?

Simply importing the content into About the English category is not a solution, because the old Ask page is described on the wiki page and is no longer valid due to the new features.
Basically the description has to be recreated, no matter if on the wiki page or here.

I believe pinned topics such as these would have more visibility…

I have great respect for your believe.
However, the question I have is, How can the new description to be created always be accessed from the same starting point?

I would like to briefly describe what I consider to be the advantage of a wiki page:

  • Thanks to the translation capability of the FuzzyBot, it is relatively easy to create a description in multiple languages starting from English.

My summary: Not everything new is better, but you can work on it.
At the moment I don’t see any sense in adding a description to a question/answer structure.

Thanks again to all who have sacrificed their time so far.

#9

I fail to see how that’s an argument against any particular solution; retitling and editing is a no brainer both here as well as on the wiki.

Sure, didn’t mean to import verbatim…

Not sure what do you mean here? Wiki pages and Discourse topics are both accessible directly by their respective URLs, and these URLs can be linked in the FAQ, any other topics, the footer, wherever. One does not exclude the other. In addition though, pinned Discourse topics will show up at the top of the list until read/unlisted; internal links can be automatically prettified and scored; and consolidating links within a single site means more visibility in terms of SEO.

FWIW AskBot sent very few people to that wiki page: during the week-preceeding the migration I count only 7 requests… The reality is probably a bit higher since not everyone sends the referrer across origins, but even when counting all requests minus the ones that are obviously bots I count only 20 under the same period; and most of these originate from individual Askbot questions such as Inkscape and Libreoffice. Not saying moving it elsewhere will magically raise awareness, but there is room for improvement :slight_smile:

That’s true, but I’m not sure how important that is in that context — Cc’ing @sophi for her advice. AFAIK folks on the localized sites/categories have different workflow and etiquette, not everything has to be aligned to English.

I guess opinions diverge about it even among prominent Askbot users, see for instance Guidelines for asking :slight_smile: I’m not really an AskLibO user myself, but noticed that there is already a lot of content here that’s not suitable for a QnA workflow, starting with this very topic or #meta in general. Unlike before we can now disable QnA for particular categories and/or tags for a typical forum-like experience. We can also auto-delete replies and auto-close topics after a configurable period. And pin topics to bring them to users’ attention and increase visibility.

#10

Some ideas to improve visibility:

  • Have @discobot send newly registered users a pointer to the page. (This would work for wiki pages as well.) In fact I believe it does that already and point to the FAQ, but given how few have read it it might not work anymore due to our SAML-based authentication. Either way it would only for for English, since at registration time we don’t know yet which categories the user intends to participate in.
  • Gamification: Assign a badge to people who read the category-specific guidelines (for any category). Discourse already does that for the FAQ, but this is unsuitable for us since it’s not localized. We could either redefine that badge or make a new one. Of course, this would only work if said guidelines are builtin into AskLibO, not if they live in another site.
  • When someone tries to post and hasn’t read the guidelines yet (or has last read N days before their last post), link to them in a dialog overlaying the preview pane. (Discourse does that when one is trying to link to a URL that’s already linked. Greying out the various CreatePost buttons until the user has read the guidelines would be nice, but I don’t know if the UI has the logic logic for that.)

No idea how hard it would be to implement these, but in principle it should be doable.

#12

@guilhem thank you very much for your explanations and reasons.
I don’t want to go into all the points directly now, but bring the concern to the front.

One point that has not been a priority for me so far has convinced me to use the AskLibO.
It is the possibility that all users can contribute to this description. This would be a bit more difficult with the wiki.

I am convinced that you will find a good solution for the visibility (link, pin or similar).

As title I would like to use the already mentioned “How to use the Ask page”.

If someone has a better suggestion for this, it can be named here.

I will create a rough content and post it here (at: How to use the Ask page) (in a few days).

To get a certain structure for the whole thing, I imagine to use the actual question to write an introduction.
Individual answers should then stand for the individual function points.

Just an example:
Question: Introduction / Basics
Answer 1: Function 1
Answer 2: Function 2
etc.

Are there any other suggestions for the structure?

#13

@guilhem , Please, have a look:

1 Like
#14

Nice work, looks great to me! But as said I’m not really the right person to review this because I’m not really using AskLibO in the first place :slight_smile: OTOH your fellow TL4 users will probably be able to give valuable feedback.

The only thing that pops to mind is, I thought you’d be re-using About the English category. That post was (automatically) created for this very purpose and meant to be edited with proper content by community members. Perhaps your new topic could be merged in? It’s not that we have to use this post, but if not then I guess it should be un-pined and deleted. Or did you have another purpose in mind for that topic?

Either way, should I toggle QnA on your topic? Right now it shows with a couple of Answers which are not really answers/solutions per se :slight_smile: Without QnA they’ll show are mere replies instead, with any follow-up replies being added at the end.

1 Like
#15

@guilhem

Either way, should I toggle QnA on your topic?

Yes, that’s a good idea. :grinning:

I don’t think I understand enough about it :frowning:

#16

As it turns out it’s not possible to toggle it on a per-topic basis. The only exception is the so-called category topic which is About the English category . I suppose that’s a strong reason to reuse that topic instead of creating a new one :slight_smile: It’s possible to disable QnA for specific tags though.

#19

@guilhem , sorry for the Question.

Is the topic allocation of

done, or is there still something that needs to be done?

In the meantime, I have additionally created the topic in the wiki.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Ask/Guide_-_How_to_use_the_Ask_site
It is also already localized for German.

For hints in answers it is easier to handle, because you can also jump to a sublink.

#20

Not sure what you mean by “Topic allocation”, but if you don’t want to recycle the category “landing page” About the English category and is fine with QnA presentation then I guess it is. The landing page ought to be deleted or filled some some other content though.

It’s also doable here, you can jump to a particular by appending its number (see the :link: icon at the footer), and each heading is assigned an anchor, too (hover to see the link). For instance

Foo

link

Bar

link

Baz

link

#21

It’s also doable here, …

Ah, thanks.

#22

About the English category

I will have a look at that.

#23

@guilhem
in About the English category is written: “(Replace this first paragraph…”.
Is this what the title means. (Sorry I am not a native English speaker)

#24

The topic title? No, that’s ”About the English category” and you can edit it by clicking on the pencil next to it. You might need to add a tag, in that case #meta is probably a good choice since we’ll need to recategorize/review these anyway.

#25

I only understand “station” at the moment.

I don’t want to write about the English category, but how to use this Ask page (as already written).

So with the pencil at the title, I can change the title to “This is the guide: How to use the Ask site?” and paste the answers from there after?

#26

@Hrbrgr: Yes.

#27

Thanks!
Sometimes it’s easier than one might think :grinning:

#28

@guilhem
Can you please delete the existing question:

This is the guide: How to use the Ask site?

I have copied out the contents.

However, I cannot create a new title in “About the English category” as long as this question still exists.

Thank you. Feedback after deletion would be great.

#29

I think you can do that yourself, expand the menu at the bottom of the question and click the trashbin icon.

#30

No, the bin indicates “you do not have permission to delete”.

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