How can we better serve you with this community?

[#1]

The Cloudera Community has been helping users find answers to their Hadoop questions for over three years now. Over that time the community, along with the Hadoop ecosystem, has grown and changed in many ways. As a result, we are assessing the current and future state of this community to ensure that we are offering an environment that best meets the needs of our users. This is where we need your help. We are opening this thread to collect your feedback on what you like, what can be improved and any new features you would like on the community.

Some potential areas we would like feedback on are:

• Segmentation of the forums - Currently the boards are mostly based on components and their function.   This makes it difficult to know where to post your new question and can also reduce the number of people who see your topic.
• Discussion style: is the current discussion thread style working for you?  Are there examples of other communities with a more intuitive style?

• Your total community hub: we are considering a large revamp of how you interact with us and find content and connections that you need.  Instead of just being discussion boards, would you like a single portal for all your community needs?  Including local meetup and conference registration, documentation, rich media tutorials, blogs, contests and fun rewards like quests, points, and badges that can earn you not only reputation but other real-world benefits?
• Are there other ways we can make it easier and more fun to interact with Cloudera, our content, and your peers?
• Improvements to current features - What features do we have that you would like to improve? A few examples:
• Improved site search
• Advanced user profile linked to your social media and allowing you to add and connect with others based on skills/interests
• Personalizable views/home screens
• Anything else you would like to add.

[#2]

Why does the search have KB and Community as different options? I would want to search both if I had an issue and was trying to see if others had encountered and fixed it already.

[#3]

Last one for the night, I swear, I see that there is an 'insert code' option but I don't see it used often enough. Is there a way to remind the user prior to posting that they could use the feature? Or on the users first post give a tooltip?

Along the lines of helping post be more readable and constructive, the guidelines state to provide as much context as possible but I think there should be some way to encourage or discourage not providing context. Too often not enough information is provided and that is the first response. Sometimes the OP does not know where to find it and maybe we need more KBs on how to do that. I think items like CDH version and Service could be made mandatory depending on the topic/tag assigned.

[#4]

Thank you for the feedback @mbigelow. This is just the kind of verification we need to back up our own thoughts on improving the community. While I cannot promise all the items on your list will come to fruition, they will be considered. For example, separated search is due to the platform that underlies the community. 

[#5]

I should have clarified a little bit more on the search. When you use the search for the community it provides both forum and Community Knowledge articles that match the terms. The seperator is for if you want to look at just the knowledge articles. You can see the icons next to the search results for both kinds of content in the screen shot below.

[#6]

Can we publish some Cloudera emploee? There are some questions that no one answers, if we can @   some professional emploee of Cloudera, that would be great.

[#7]

Thanks for responding, I would like to clarify your suggestion @lwmonster. Are you asking for a directory of Cloudera employees so you @ mention one on certain issues? 

If that is the case it may not be the best solution but I'm willing to discuss it. 🙂

Looking at the Community guidelines you will see the following description of the community. 

The mission of the community is to provide a first-class peer-based forum for developers and admins to collaborate on the use of Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop-based platform to build and manage enterprise data hubs. 

Primarily the community is a peer to peer forum where users assist each other with issues. That being said, Clouderans do participate in addition to their normal duties as time allows. We also keep an eye out for threads with multiple posters experiencing the same issue. If there is a solution we sometimes turn the content into a community knowledge article so it is easier to find. If there isn't a solution, we sometimes are able to get a Clouderan to reply.

If anyone has a desire for additional support we have several options including the low cost Cloudera Developer Program for Dev/Test environments. As this thread suggests, we are indeed looking for ways to improve the community so I look forward to seeing your thoughts on this as well as any other suggestions you have.   

[#8]

I believe it will help if you can create additional areas under http://community.cloudera.com/t5/Configuring-and-Managing-the/ct-p/ConfiguringPlatform for CDS, CDK etc.

Currently there are only the following three:

• Cloudera Manager
• Cloudera Director
• CDH

[#9]

Thanks for the feedback @GeKas. Typically new boards are created when there is sufficient volume in a particular topic. That being said, we are working on a plan to simplify the board structure on the community using less boards in the future. Under the new plan, topics would be surfaced via the assigned labels on the community. 

In the meantime, I'll do some looking into ways to better surface these topics. 

[#10]

Please provide option to raise a new topic. Your community portal do not have option to raise new topic.

[#11]

Thank you for posting the feedback @ramarov. Community members who are logged in can use the "New Message" button at the top of each board to start a new topic. Is there a specific area you are not seeing this button?