META: Improving Community Participation

#1

I’ve been thinking about the super-thread about AdMob (you know the one) and decided to take a closer look at the data.

In terms of topics with most replies, this topic ranks #2 at the moment (thanks again to all the Power Thunkers who helped out responding to this question!)

In terms of unique users posting, I’m fairly confident that this topic is #1 (so far > 96 different creators have participated!) Now, on the surface at least, that’s great. New people have joined the community and posted questions that had never posted questions before. This is the whole idea of the community after all.

What I find most interesting is that despite having so many people and so many posts, in terms of “views” this topic is way down the list, it’s actually number #395 on our most viewed topics.

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So what’s going on here? While some community members did remain and contributed to the conversation, the vast majority were never seen again. They didn’t check back in on the discussion, they didn’t participate in the surveys or contribute to the testing, they didn’t even “like” the posts of their fellow community members who were voicing their shared concerns.

I’d really like to hear your opinion on this - what can or should we, as a community, do to improve participation in discussions? Not just in longer topics like the AdMob one, but discussions in general where someone asks as question and then vanishes. No likes, no “solved”, nothing?

I can’t promise that I’ll be able to implement all your suggestions, but I’ll do my best.

Thanks,

Domhnall

#2

I can only speak for myself so please don’t get me wrong. There is something which really annoyes me in this community. There are so many users who don’t formulate their questions properly. I have seen so many threads which are like “urgent please help”. Sometimes I feel like some users don’t really appreciate that there is someone who is spending spare time in order to help them. I can only guess but maybe this is a reason why some users are not that active anymore. I think it would help if there is something like a “new thread guideline”. This would mean that a user has to answer a few questions which helps other users to understand the problem before opening a new thread.

#3

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this @Dennis, I can appreciate where you are coming from. I noticed something similar a while ago, so I wrote this:

https://community.thunkable.com/t/how-to-ask-great-questions/1286?u=domhnall

However, almost a year after I wrote it, I also wrote a follow-up post explaining some of it’s shortcomings.

Do you think we need a more concise version? What would you include in these guidelines? I’d be more than happy to help implement this.

#4

I use this one on a couple of forums where i am a mod.

Modified it from one i found on a totally not related forum. :sunglasses:

#5

:joy: this seems kind of familiar to me - do I get credit as the “inspiration” for this?

As I mentioned in my critique of HTAGQ one of the main issues is it’s too verbose.

I a lot of cases it’s just quicker to type a question than to go to all the effort of reading guidelines, do searches etc.

Would you be interested in collaborating on a shorter, more helpful version?

#6

If you want. You, and the users who needed it, were surely the inspiration to make this. It is the most copied link in the two forums i guess. :grin:

I wonder if a shorter, more helpful version as you call it will help. As users subscribe to the forum they can follow a tutorial on how the forum works. But i think they also can get a TOS form which they have to accept. That would be a good place to put this type of text.

Found this when i googled.

#7

Upto what I think, this :point_up: happens because there are users who have just joined the community, and ask a question, which upon reading, reflects that they already have built their app, but they suddenly faced a problem during this app building, and so they only signed up to ask the question.

And after they get the answer they vanish with no likes, no solution tick-mark(I also had raised a issue for this ‘solution’, but no one took that seriously :expressionless: ) as you stated earlier.
They only sign-up because it is compulsory to do so to ask question. If this would not have been the case, then they would have not even bothered to get signed-up.

#8

Thanks for your feedback @Dennis, @Peter_Mathijssen and @Vaibhav_Patil

As a first step towards encouraging better conversations here, I’ve updated the placeholder text for all new conversations. This won’t have any impact on existing users but hopefully it will give new posters some suggestions for their own posts.

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#9

I think this is already very useful, especially that everyone has to read it before posting. I’ve been thinking about some questions which every user should answer before opening a thread. I came up with these 6 points:
-Describe your problem in detail
-Which plattform do you use? (X or Classic)
-Which components do you use?
-What have you tried already to solve the problem?
-Do you have an idea why this problem occurs?
-Can you provide us with a link or screenshots related to this problem?

Hope this helps :slight_smile: