Best Practices for using HCC

[#1]

Some helpful ideas to keep content organized in the community forums.

Topic Tags : Pay attention to misspelled tags and avoid conjoined tags.

• The ability to group forum posts together by a topic is diminished when there are multiple, differently-spelled tags for the same topic. Having all similar posts tagged in common helps with grouping and ranking of content. Tags will add value for integration with the Hortonworks Gallery and other public sites, so having clean consistent usage of topic tags, especially for standard HDP components, will really help things look good.

  As an example: If some posts are tagged as 'NiFi' and some as 'dataflow' but they are referring to the same thing, then it will be hard for the AnswerHub system to rank the one overall topic by popularity, or for users to click on a tag and see all relevant questions.

• Best-practices:
  • When posting a question, idea, or article, scan the topics page and search for the proper tag as it may exist before you create a new one.
  • If you see multiple tags with the same meaning, consolidate to the correct tag.
  • If you see a topic that is misspelled, you can edit and correct that tag.
  • Use each topic in an individual tag. Having a conjoined tag such as [ambari with kerberos] or [nifi dataflow] is not useful compared to the standard of using separate individual tags, like [Ambari], [kerberos] or [nifi], [dataflow].

Comments vs. Replies : Pay attention to the difference between a comment and a reply.

• A comment to a question is used if requesting clarification or validation of the question. Comments cannot be accepted as a valid answer by the requester. Comments cannot be liked or shared by anyone, and do not contribute to the overall 'Number of replies' count for the post.
• A reply is used to provide an answer. Replies can be accepted as a valid answer, liked, rewarded and shared, so there is much more value to the community if your answer is placed into a proper reply. If you reply and it is accepted, it helps to increase your reputation as well as the value score of the question.
• Best-practices:
  • If you are providing any intrinsic value such as a technical answer, solution architecture, suggested design, alternative idea, etc. you should use the reply function so your information provides context.
  • If you see that someone has provided 'comment-level' text in a reply, click on the gear-menu and convert the reply into a comment by selecting the menu option 'Convert Answer to Comment' (limited to track moderators)

[#2]

Great suggestions for the guildellines. Can you add these to the Guidelines on the wiki here:

Hortonworks User Forum Guidelines

[#3]

Two additional questions regarding best practices for this community:

1. When/how are "available votes" replenished? It looks like I started with 20, and after I spend them they slowly increase over time. This falls under best practices because it should influence how people spend their votes.
2. Is there a tag we're using to indicate "attention needed" before AH becomes publicly visible? More like "let's get a second set of eyes to see if this needs scrubbing" as opposed to an aggressive "Violation!"

[#4]

Oops, #2 is answered on the wiki:

Flag content that is not appropriate. Replying to abusive, off-topic, or inappropriate content only encourages it – whereas flagging allows removal without providing undue attention. To flag a question or answer, click the “Report” option next to the post. In the dialogue box, select the reason for the flag.