What happend with SCN? It's dead now.

[Former Member]

The old SCN was not as fancy as the new one, but it was a living community. When you posted a question you got several answers and solutions within 24 hours.

I guess one of the main motivations where the badges. It was a Gamification gimmick, but it worked. People were motivated to answer questions and to contribute.

I heard that the main reasons on why the badges were removed was because some people cheated. But SAP shouldn't have punished the entire community by removing them. People put a lot of effort into those badges. It may sound silly, but it was like that. It's like if you would delete all the game scores off all gamers, because some have cheated. No one would like to play your game anymore.

Now when you post a question only about 10 - 20 people are looking at it.

Look at this question for example:

https://answers.sap.com/questions/136436/restricted-role-in-sap-hana.html?childToView=137652#answer-...

Posted on February 22nd and only 22 people looked at it. It's a question about HANA roles many HANA experts could easily answer. I'm also looking forward to the answer of this questions. But no one cares anymore. All the experts have been cased away.

Please SAP you have to do something to motivate the community again to contribute.

The Karma thing is not really a help.

[JL23]

There are many people here (and some are not here anymore) having trouble with the new UI.

And as you got immediately an answer to this question (and 63 views in 1 day) rebutted that the community is dead and nobody is looking after questions.

Of course, if you have 3000 tags today vs 400 spaces before and the amount of people is just the same, then it is clear that they are more distributed now. And content under certain tags has less visitors. People would for example need to follow 5 to 20 tags to see the questions that had previously been posted just in 1 space.

I follow for example 25 tags just to collect all the questions that are wrong tagged and belong to Materials Management. If I would not do that then many of those questions would not be seen by those who can answer them, resulting in even more frustration, on both sites, the people who do not get answers and those who do not find questions of interest.

For example, your other question was tagged with a tag which had no corresponding space in old SCN.

Now just imagine users who answered for many years questions in the SAP Business Warehouse in old SCN which was migrated to SAP Business Warehouse in the new Community (you see, same name as before) did probably still look and follow SAP Business Warehouse

But your question is tagged with SAP BW/4HANA and FIN General Ledger (both did not exist in old SCN), you might have had more views with the old BW tag and FIN (Finance) instead of FIN General Ledger.

People who ask questions have an "advantage" because they just select the tag in their question, while answering questions requires from the people that they have to search for a tag which could potentially have a question, and if there is a question they can follow this tag and can later operate from their Activities. But if there is no content yet then they cannot even follow this tag precautionary.

I can just recommend to use tags that are an equivalent to a former space and only use the new tags if you are really certain that they belong to your work area and that they are the best tag for your question.

See this blog https://blogs.sap.com/2016/12/19/whatever-happened-to.../ , at the end is a link to the mapping file.

While I do my best to address the grievances I also believe on market mechanisms. If a tag is not going to be used then it is a potential candidate for the next clean up. And if a tag has just questions but no answers then the people will realize this too. And if the questions do not get answers here then the people try to get answers elsewhere which can't be the goal for the company who owns this site.

[Former Member]

"And as you got immediately an answer to this question (and 63 views in 1 day) rebutted that the community is dead and nobody is looking after questions."

No, it doesn't. This is a rather controversial questions, with an eye-catching headline. And I got 2 answers from Moderators. Only one non-SAP community member replied.

I realized my mistake. I wrote "SAP BW" and "SAP BW/4HANA" was the only tag suggested. Afterwards, I realized that you have to type "SAP Business Warehouse" to get the right tag.

But you are right, that it will take some time to get used to the new tagging system.

However, I'm not the only one saying this, many community members see it the same (as written in the link above).

[JL23]

This just sounds as if moderators would not be normal users...I don't work for SAP, answering questions is a hobby and moderation just a voluntarily extra burden which I wouldn't do if I was not here for answering questions.

[raghug]

Adding my voice so you know that non-SAP non-Moderators are also looking at this... If you go to Coffee Corner, you will lots of constructive (and not) discussions about the new site and what people want to see from it.

[Former Member]

The whole tagging system is a mess. Look at the HANA role question asked in my initial question (not by me). Where should you tag this?

"SAP HANA Studio" - not really it's not a problem of the Studio. There I would expect specific problems with the Studio software itself.

But what is it then? I didn't find a better one.

Instead of having 3000 tags it would be better to have spaces back.

I don't think it is straightforward if I have to download an Excel file with 3000 rows.

[ricardojasso]

"And as you got immediately an answer to this question (and 63 views in 1 day) rebutted that the community is dead and nobody is looking after questions."

After more than two years contributing regularly in the old SCN I stopped participating when the new system was launched. It was just to painful to use. But from time to time I come back to see what new feature has been added / fixed that might prompt me to return. If I don't see anything new I then go straight to this tag (Using SCN) and look for new or updated questions about the community being dead, which are quite a few. I get entertained for a while and then step out.

Maybe that's why this type of questions get so many attention. People are eager to have this fixed.