Frustrated with SCN?

[#1]

Personally I have been a SAP BASIS guy 15 years. As you might imagine that means lots of time troubleshooting notes, sdn, scn etc

I was not a great fan of SDN in the end but I could find stuff eventually. SCN is an utter disaster.

1/ It takes too long to find anything. At least we could search by forums. But now its "spaces". Searching for the right "spaces" takes too long as we have to load a small number of "spaces" per page along with the last post. The search function is useless as who knows the exact keywords in the "space" name.

2/ Moderation - drop the long wait for moderation and drop the 30 requirement to avoid moderation. Other sites deal with spam etc OK and do not force us to perform juvenile tasks to get badges. I work for several clients a year and having to go thru these childish games is pointless.

3/ I have seen a marked drop in technical posts as people turn to the many other sites that support SAP.

All in all these changes are killing what was once a mildly useful resource.

Who agrees with me.....

[former_member190578]

Who agrees with me.....

I still agree with you!

I am ABAP Developer for over 18 years and I didn't complain the first 15-16 years at all.

But now the last few years it's getting worse.

Without Google search I wouldn't find anything in this disaster.

[Former Member]

This is because of the stupid points system.

Thanks for speaking out after 18 years  🙂

Just a joke: I agree with you that the system is designed to go downhill as far as content quality is concerned.

I have been asking for the system to be more content specific and less user mongering for years, but so far no luck to find something that SAP did not bolt onto a noise factor.

Perhaps oneday we will all land back at SAPfans.com and the cycle will start over with sfvenkitu, or subsistence living in the agricultural sector, or IoT expert for deployable artificially intelligent sensors which can be remotely controlled via module pool tables...  (someone asked about this in the CC but I see that the question has been removed now... 😉

Your best chance here is to hijack the question...

Cheers,

Julius

[matt]

But I have to say, if I need to find something, google search with site:scn.sap.com usually comes up with the goods.

[Lukas_Weigelt]

Well that's the point. Imagine there's no google and no site Index page from . I would probably emigrate to the DSAG usergroup forums.

[agentry_src]

I think I would point the finger in several places:

1. The focus of SCN became social networking where blogs became more important than wiki/forums from the old SDN.  Gamification gets a lot of the blame, but I think that seems to be a mixed bag as points existed in the former system as well as points gaming.  It does seem to have gotten worse with the different avenues to adding points now.
2. It would also appear that SAP has a confused perspective on SCN.  Moderators go head to head with newbies, often SAP employees, who put copied help content, SAP Notes' contents, etc. into SCN as part of their responsibilities and don't understand why it gets rejected.  Perhaps a review of the Rules of Engagement be required before posting their first item?  That would also help with external newbies.
3. Mixed bag of Space Editors/Moderators who are added without really any understanding of the responsibilities and duties.  First contribute before you are put in control.
4. Number 3 is compounded by the lack of a closed loop (visibility) on Moderator processing across SCN.  Which leads to inconsistency in moderation from community to community and often enough within a single community.
5. Last, but not least, Jive sucks.

Regards, Mike

SAP Customer Experience Group - CEG

[JasonLax]

Google Custom Search for SAP Community Network Search is the same as doing a site:scn.sap.com query but with the addition of the Wiki and Library. 

An laternative to the is going to http://scn.sap.com/places and then entering a keyword or term in the filter box to find a related space.

[moshenaveh]

Hello Mike,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.It helps us constantly improve.

2. We recently had a couple of these cases which were handled firmly and involved management when needed. If you still see this happening please let me know.

3. Our moderation approval process consists of expertise evaluation, SCN activity review, moderation need and more. We usually consult with existing moderators and ask for their feedback. If you encounter cases where someone is not doing their job, please let me know. I will take upon my self to closer examine moderation applicant activity on SCN prior to approving them.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the moderators approval process.

4. That's what the global moderators are for. If you see any inconsistency please let one of us know. I can share with you that even in our team we don't always agree on all moderation cases.

[agentry_src]

Hi Moshe,

Caught me in a venting sort of mood.  So numbers 1 and 2 were just kind of general gripes.

Number 4, where there is virtually no visibility into the moderation process after the fact, means that other moderators have no clue who processed a particular item or what the rationale was behind it.  So how can we determine inconsistency.

For example:

I was in the midst of rejecting a blog this morning for being trivial, but someone else apparently approved it while I was doing so.  Since there are 4 space editors and 4 moderators for that particular space, of which 5 could be determined to have logged on recently enough that they could have been involved.  Which one did it?  Who knows.  Why they approved it, again who knows.  Not a new issue, but apparently one which is not very high on the priority list for fixing.  Perhaps there is a rational for hiding identities.  I can't imagine anything to justify it.  I can tell you which space it was in.  Once it is processed, it is gone from view.  The only thing that remains is the email notification.

You
have received this email because content with the title 'viz charting by
json Model' created by 'Mohammad umar umar' is awaiting moderation.

It is less an issue with someone accepting content that I would have rejected than I would like to know the rationale behind it.  Different moderators work differently and that is fine.  But for consistency, there needs to be a feedback loop and that does not exist.

Thanks, Mike

[moshenaveh]

Hello Mike,

I see. No worries, feedback as I said helps us improve. I hope that in the future we will such features. Until then maybe space editors and moderators can create a DM and raise issues between them.

Moshe

[Former Member]

Hi Mike,

It's interesting you mention the feedback loop following actioned moderation tasks...  At TechEd Berlin I spent some time with one of the guys currently looking at the revamp of SCN and this was one of the top things I suggested we needed.  As you describe, being able to see the decision made and by whom, for the history of moderation in spaces you look after would be invaluable.

I suggested the Moderation area should gain a new tab where you can list all historic & actioned tasks and view the details of them as needed.

Fingers crossed this is something we see in the future...

Cheers,

G.

[agentry_src]

Hi Gareth,

Would be nice as this is one of my hot button pet peeves and has been for a long time now.  The lack of history means it is difficult to learn from it on many levels.

Thanks, Mike

[Former Member]

Maybe we could move it to the top of the to-do list of developments by suggesting it could be a "big data" use case and it could run on HANA...

[stephenjohannes]

But the problem here is that under the old-chickenwire platform(pre-jive) we actually had moderation console and could do a lot more with moderation history.  When the transition was made to jive, that went away and most of all the moderators complained and the response was:

"Jive doesn't support that".

Furthermore it's interesting how many feature requests which were valid, all were rejected by "jive doesn't support that".  So unless jive as a platform supports new stuff, and SAP is going update jive on SCN to the latest version or better yet get rid of jive for something more open, I have very low expectations of what could/should be done.

The biggest problem with jive is that it's the jack of all trades and the master of none.  There are much better pure discussion boards run by hobbyists, than default jumble of spaces view presented by jive.

Take care,

Stephen

[former_member190578]

This is because of the stupid points system.

Thanks for speaking out after 18 years  :-)

Just a joke: I agree with you that the system is designed to go downhill as far as content quality is concerned.

Yes, this stupid point system.

Some guys just repeat an correct answer and begging for points. And they do this all time.

Some guys mention there points or rang in this SAP system in there profile.

[Former Member]

Exactly that is what I get as feedback fro most of my customers. They will use google search with "julius" for my areas, but if they relax that search pattern or search in other areas then it is mostly noise.

IMO it is not an error in the google search algorithm, which works fine if you use very targeted searches. It is a noise factor on SCN.

It is a problem that interesting discussions with interesting solutions with some technical details (for the search) are flooded by mindless texts and linkfarms. Only people who can search would contribute and because of the noise they often dont.

The SCN system does not encourage content quality enough and draw attention to that content quality. Marketing is 50% of the real estate now and good questions are soon flooded by interview questions and "do my work for me" after the interview. Knowledgable folks move on.

I miss the days when used to pop around in the Coffee Corner for a joke and take note of the **** and mowning on a daily basis. Things improved a lot. Back then it was possible as a community feedback area to at least see some effort.

I am still thankful that in my security area it is not as noisy as in most other areas.

Cheers,

Julius

[Colleen]

I am still thankful that in my security area it is not as noisy as in most other areas.

That is down to you and other moderators being quite consistent in decisions of what is quality content

I must admit, when I search for security questions I usually add your name, Otto, Alex, mine, Frank and a few others into the Google Search to filter. I add names as I see their reputation and quality post. I risk missing the infrequent participants who are well respected but hope by following others I pick them up in my Activity Feeds.