I want to summarize the issues of the current Community web interface that prevent me to use it in the efficient way. All below issues were already reported and discussed number of times but after 7 months of the new Community I don’t see significant progress.
A few words about my Community usage profile. I am answering questions for the number of tags including SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver; EPM Add-In for Excel and some other (1122 answers for the new Community on 19.05.2017 and a lot of comments). I have also written some blogs and I am searching for the information on the Community pages.
In order to answer I need a list of questions for the tags I am interested in. Unfortunately, currently it’s not possible to have
multiple tag questions on the same page. I have to open multiple tags in multiple tabs of my browser and constantly switch between tabs. It was not an issue in the old SCN when 99% of questions I was interested in were in a single Space. Today we have much more tags then spaces in old SCN.
When answering I have to play with answer/comment approach resulting in a very unclear discussion structure (like topic author providing answer instead of comment, etc.). I prefer generic
“Reply” instead of answer/comment. The ability to sort replies by timestamp is also required.
There are also issues with the number of levels of comments (comment in reply to comment). After some level you have to press “Show More” button to view extra comments. And after some level you are not able to reply to the last comment at all.
Number of levels has to be increased to support real life discussion.
Starting from some Community engine update the comments are collapsed by default. As a result, I have to spend time to expand comments. The option to
expand/collapse comments has to be configurable in the user profile.
When posting answer/comment using Firefox ESR 52 I often copy/paste some words from question text. And paste results in the
insert of carriage return before and after pasted text. I have to manually delete mentioned carriage returns. I don’t have this issue on any other site.
With Firefox ESR 52 I am
unable to paste pictures directly in the question/answer (Ctrl V). I have to save picture in some local folder and then upload it to the Community Web site. I don’t have this issue on any other site. And the same issue is confirmed for Chrome, IE and Safari.
Sometimes my comments can be deleted by the question author if I am replying on his reply and he delete his reply. The general rule has to be:
if there is a reply after some post then this post can’t be deleted even by the author.
Notifications on the Web page or by e-mail are partly useless for me. I am receiving notification only for direct reply,
not for any new content posted under question I am answering. I have to refresh tag pages to see if somebody added some posts.
I am using P-ID to participate in the Community due to changing S-ID. The result is that I am unable to browse notes or view protected help resources in the same browser with S-ID. I have to
use different browser (IE) to work with S-ID and copy paste links between browsers.
There are number of other minor bugs but I want to summarize things critical for me in a table:
I will update this blog when issues will be solved.
B.R.
Vadim Kalinin
P.S. In the comments column I have added links to the Q&A, Idea Place and other discussions with similar ideas.
Update on 12.10.2017 Comments levels issue solved!
Update on 16.03.2018 Items #10, #11 and #12 added (not new, added for consistency)
Update on 08.10.2018 With new Community design - no comments levels at all (from 27.09.2018)!
