What happened to SDN (quality)?

[stefan_koehler]

Hello SDN staff and SDN members,

i am using SDN on daily business / basis and after the last months i got the feeling, that the quality of the platform and (my) used areas dropped more and more.

Let me just point out three parts of my experience over the last months:

1) Obviously bugs in some basic areas of a social media network

-> https://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2034648

The bug was accepted and assigned - after one month i asked the SDN development team about this issue and the answer:

There has been no update on this. The development cycles are approximately one month apart so a bug reported in one month can take up to two months to see a resolution. 

The SDN staff itself was really exerted to work around this issue for me, but unfortunately without any success. So i tried it once again today and the bug is still there (since Sep 9, 2011 when i reported it).

2) Blog approval time

I wrote a blog article round about one week ago and set the status to "Ready for Approval". Since yesterday it got no feedback or approval for it, so i thought maybe there was a bug in the blog system as well and set the status again. But since today nothing has changed. The blog article is still on "Ready for Approval". I got no problem if it is rejected or something like that, but in my opinion that time line is much too long to get some feedback by SAP. For my part i already think about blogging on my own site, so i got no delays and i got the control of my own stuff (with a much better UI). Unfortunately the other SDN members would not find that information - so it's kind of a double bind.

3) Automatic (re-)login using SSL certificate

Somewhere in the last two month - the automatic login by SSL certifcate stopped working. So if you open the URL "https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/forums" you are not logged in by using your stored SSL certificate - you have to click on "Login" and just after that the SSL certificate is used. This would be not the biggest problem at all, but if your session expires while writing or editing some posts or blogs you are not able to save the content anymore, because you are not automatically logged in. Really annoying.

Do you (SDN members) have the same experience / impression of SDN or am i the only one?

Best Regards

Stefan

[lbreddemann]

Hi Stefan,

apart from your points (which I can fully agree upon) I'm quite disappointed by the quality of content I see lately.

Blogs like

[http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/28721]

and

[http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/28713]

make reading SDN blogs a waste of time.

Knowing how time consuming is can be to come up with a nice little piece of text that can be published as a blog post I really have a hard time to rectify spending that time for my blogs when I see stuff like these two blogs going online without any resistance.

I don't know how to avoid or reduce or limit or get rid of such ... accidental writings but this has to end if we want to keep SDN a reasonable serious knowledge platform.

Maybe dislike- or -1 buttons could help.

Maybe writer-classes could do.

Maybe co-lecturing via random/topic-based reviewer assignment could help.

Any ideas anybody?

Cheers,

Lars

[ThomasZloch]

I agree, these efforts are lame, the second one even more so.

You will probably not be delighted to hear (if you don't know it already) that after the SCN migration blogs will appear instantly in the open without any moderation, and even worse with automatic points assignment (as far as I know). Let's count the hours until people find out and misuse this systematically.

It then comes down to the knowledgeable and courageous risking to be the "bad guys" or "discouraging newbies" by pointing out the deficits, like what you did in this case. There is no "thumbs down" button, but at least one can rate 1 to 5 stars.

I'm quite sceptical about how this will unfold and the effects on SCN quality after the migration.

Thomas

[stephenjohannes]

I agree these blogs were less than ideal. My thoughts though is that even on the new platform, it's going to be less "spammy" as I have yet to see a central blog feed. Personally I think the site is going to splinter into about 100 different small communities and we will all be wondering how do we see everything again vs seeing too much garbage in general.

Now after testing the beta-site for a while, I can say that moderation tools/blog pieces should be sufficient post publishing to address most of the quality issues. Plus blogs can be moved more like forum posts(there really isn't too much of a difference IMHO between the two, beyond question/length), so I think it will not be a problem.

That being said until things migrate over, we are stuck with the current system which really doesn't provide enough technical tools to handle most of the issues we all complain about when it comes to blog moderation/quality/etc. I'm not going to tell you to be patient or like what is happening right now. I will say if/when things move to the otherside, things will need to improve or that wishlist on idea place is going to get a lot longer.

Take care,

Stephen