[meta] Suggestions (hopefully usefull)

Thought I would start up something for a few suggestions, since I did not see a feedback link or section. If you would like we can just keep this ongoing or not, since this does not really have a right or wrong answer to check. I know you can throw suggestions out on Twitter with #askssc, but you can only do so much with 140 characters.

As suggestions are given as answers, once they get high vote-ups I will edit the question and add them here so the popular ones get grouped together (along with who posted it).

Suggestions:
- A way to subscribe to a tag. (I know this might cause a high volume of email alerts overall so I don't know if this would be good or not. My thought would be if you subscribed to it, you accept the volume that could come with it. You can subscribe to topics on SSC so I would compare it to that feature.)
- Along the lines of tags, add a section in FAQ on use of tags on Ask SSC. Something that includes the little bit of info if your tag is more than one word you have to use dashes, space makes it a seperate tag. (so SQL Server is not the same as SQL-Server)
- When adding code block is not not to intuitive on formating it correctly. Hovering over the icon on the format bar I just saw that the HTML tags to use are "pre" and "code" together. Suggest putting that in the "Markdown Basics" section to the right of the question box.
- Community Wiki. I don't really get the point of this. I understand what it is, I just don't know why you would need it. If I'm asking a question I don't really see many folks that are going to go alter my question, other than retagging it correctly, or altering the post I mark as the answer. Usually they will just add another answer or comment to the answer I marked. I see folks marking their question as community wiki (I have before) but it is really used for that manner?

asked Jun 30 '11 at 08:59 PM in Default

Shawn_Melton
4.7k ● 13 ● 18 ● 27

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1 answer:

Shawn,

thanks for your input.

You're right there is nowhere specific to discuss the site itself, and we took the decision to keep it within the site, tagged accordingly. Mods and Admins will read this and will take on board your suggestions, but ultimately we are limited at present to the functionality that the OSQA platform offers.

Let me just cover some more on those points:

Subscribe to a tag - you can subscribe to a RSS feed for a tag, ~~but not via email (yet)~~. Simply browse to a tag page and click the RSS icon e.g. SQL-Server-2005 : http://ask.sqlservercentral.com/tags/sql-server-2005/?type=rss

Using tags - I'd agree with this, we need to be more forceful about educating users. Adding the FAQ is definitely something we can do
Formatting code - there are many ways of formatting code: indenting by 4 spaces, HTML tags, tick mark `, as there are many ways of formatting in general. The space on the right is not huge and we could probably do to review what is best in here, code formatting being one, but also be mindful that we can't include everything.
Community Wiki - this has been debated before :) The best use of it (was) that a question marked as such would not add karma points to your overall score, and all answers to a Community Wiki question would be themselves Community Wiki posts, but since the move to OSQA, the last part doesn't work and the whole community wiki thing is a bit of a muddle. We used to use it for [meta] and other such off-topic questions, but again I'd agree this needs looking at.

answered Jul 01 '11 at 01:18 AM

Kev Riley ♦♦
46.1k ● 39 ● 43 ● 69

I never noticed the RSS button. I'm always in Google Reader so I can work with that.

The tick mark, that would explain why that shows up sometimes when I hit enter after hitting the code block button. Was wondering why that showed up.

Thanks.

Jul 01 '11 at 06:22 AM Shawn_Melton

You can subscribe to a tag by email. On the front page there are two text fields, "interesting" and "ignored" tags. You can add a tag to your interesting tags and setup your notification settings accordingly. Go to your profile, click "user tools" and select "notification settings", and make sure that "notify me" when "A new question matching my interesting tags is posted" is set to instantly.

In fact that'show I was notified of this question, since I have the meta-askssc tag in my interesting tags.

Jul 01 '11 at 11:13 AM hernani

Excellent, thanks @hernani

Jul 01 '11 at 11:24 AM Kev Riley ♦♦

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