Dear "Application Development and Automation" group members/subscribers, 

In case you haven't seen the general announcement post that went out earlier this week, this blog post is to inform you that we launched a pilot of new developer- and SAP-technology related forums/groups this week.

For you, this means that while the pilot runs, the "Application Development and Automation" group is set to read-only.
We would like to encourage you to go to our new developer forums/groups, if you would like to ask or answer questions, or publish blog posts, on development/technology-related topics. 

There are a number of different reasons why we would like to test these new forums/groups: 

1. Since our platform migration last year, we have received feedback that you didn't know where to go to find topics like ABAP, Integration or UI5. With these new developer forums/groups, we hope we have made it easier for you to find the technology topics you are most interested in.
   
   
2. We noticed that the discussion board in this group was used to ask development related-questions. Generally, everyone has been very helpful answering questions asked here. However, our interest groups are for having conversations with, and connecting to, like-minded people around shared interests. This is why these groups have discussion boards (= for conversations) and blog posts, instead of Q&As/forums. Therefore, when someone asks a question in the "Application Development and Automation" discussion board, it is not possible for the author to accept the right answer as a solution. This again means, that if someone with the same problem comes to the community to get help later on, they will not be able to see what the solution to the problem was.
   Which brings us to no. 3 below:
   
   
3. Because answers to questions in discussion (conversation) boards won't have accepted solutions, we are also not able to give credit to, or celebrate, the members who took the time to help answer questions.
   
   
4. With the new developer forums, authors can accept any answer as a correct solution, which means we will be able to bring back our topic expert leaderboards, and give proper credit to our members who answer questions.
   
   
5. A new denser forum feed, with no preview of content, making it easier to scroll down the feed to look for the questions you can help answer: 
   
   
   
6. New filter for "Questions with no answers". 
   This long-requested filter has now been added to all new Developers forums, so that you can find all questions with. no answers on a specific topic with one click: 
   
7. We can now highlight important product announcements, or other valuable content, you shouldn't miss, around your favourite development topics by using the "Featured Topics" section for the individual topics.
   
   
8. Better subscription management.
   You will now be able to subscribe to either all developer/SAP-technology related content, or drill down to and only subscribe to the specific parts that interest you the most:
   1. Developers https://community.sap.com/t5/developers/ct-p/developers - here you can subscribe to the whole category, this subscription sends you notifications on the platform and email notifications according to your account settings. 
   2. The individual groups, with both the Forums and Blog posts - here taking ABAP Cloud as an example: https://community.sap.com/t5/abap-cloud/gh-p/abap-cloud - here you have the same subscribe option as above. If you subscribe to content here, it will send you notifications on the platform and email notifications according to your account settings. 
   3. The individual group boards, ABAP Cloud Forum: https://community.sap.com/t5/abap-cloud-forum/bd-p/abap-cloudforum-board - here you have both the option to Subscribe and Subscribe to RSS Feed. The Subscribe option is the same as the two options above, and the RSS Feed is the one you are looking for. 
      You will find the same options for the blog posts boards as well: https://community.sap.com/t5/abap-cloud-blog-posts/bg-p/abap-cloudblog-board

If you missed the main announcement post, you can find more information in this What's New blog post. 

We hope you hop over to the new Developer groups to try them out 🙂 
If you have any feedback to us on the forums, you can provide it in the comments section on the What's New post linked above.