Hey there,
Doing some analytics on this rofum, more than half of the questions go unanswered, was wondering if there are any ideas/actions/promotions so we could have better quality answers...
Odoo is the world's easiest all-in-one management software.
It includes hundreds of business apps:
- CRM
- e-Commerce
- Accounting
- Inventory
- PoS
- Project management
- MRP
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There are 2 main problem with this platform, imo. Users and Technical. The users related problems are "the real" ones, and the technical problems make them worse by not providing tools to prevent and/or improve users related problems.
Examples of users problems and how technical problems affect them:
- Quality of questions: a lot of questions should be downright deleted. Non-questions (I saw one recently that said "Extend my trial" ??), "please do the work for me" questions, "I didn't do any research" questions (How do I modify a report? How do I define a new field?)
Related technical problems: ***Downvoted questions give +50 karma to the question asker***. The question search works bad. You can't "propose for deletion" or mark/flag other users questions. (you can delete them with 1000 karma). You can only close your questions, and it lets you choose between spam, offensive, off-topic, not in english.. all the rights categories, too bad you can use them only on your own question. What's the sense in that? Also, downvoted questions have not maluses: they can still appear on top by date of edit.
- Language: some questions and answers are written in a barely understandable English.
Related thecnical problems: Need 1000 karma to edit other people questions. See the stackexchange system for a better way (need less karma for propose an edit, and then people with enough karma need just to accept it).
- Formatting: Even if the questions are written in "okay" English, they can still be a huge mess, particularly if code is involved. A lot of questions have copypaste of a server traceback.
Related technical problem: no code formatting at the moment!
- Interactions: People answering instead of commenting, converting other people comments to answers instead of replying to them, and so on.
Related technical problems: bad UI (each comment has a "convert to answer" link exactly where one would except the "reply" link to be), can't delete own answer (if answered by mistake, for example), can't edit/delete own comments.
- People not upvoting/accepting: some of these problems can be limited by people with enough karma (1000+), but there are few of them because a large part of the community doesn't upvote answers, questions and accept answers.
Related technical problems: Find a way to encourage people to upvote good questions and answers.
In the end, I still think this platform is a nice resource. It doesn't suffer from uptime problems of the previous one (basically 50% downtime) and, being quite new, has huge potential. Features are being worked on and improvements are coming.
We can help by providing quality content and upvoting quality content.
I agree with everything tolstoj says, and would like to add that the inablity to comment on a particular answer makes it harder to actually get a dialogue going to solve an issue.
But commenting on an answer works fine? May be we should decrease the requested karma for commenting.
After posting this I accrued enough karma to comment on an answer that isn't mine, which is really helpful to me. I think lowering the threshold for that feature would definitely be appreciated by many.
Yes, you need a Karma of > 50 to comment, which is a pain!
The answer rate depends on the volunteer contributors and the quality of the questions. I tried to encourage taking the time to answer your question before you post it, and respect the audience reading them.
"If your posts are not getting answered, take a look at the ones that are getting answered and make yours more like them. Also, take the time to answer anything you can. The forums can be a great resource. If you find them valuable then you should return the favor whenever you can."
Good point. Another addition would be the attitude of the people asking. Personally I won't be answering 1-sentence-questions-please-solve-fast-I-am-in-a-hurry knowing that the person that asked the question is either A. going to ignore the rest of the posts, B. not even taking the time to just post the simple words "thank you" if you gave them a solution or C. expects me dig in and completely solve his problem for him. I got no problem occasionally helping people out and/or dive a little deeper in OpenERP (hell, it might even improve my understanding of the software!) but don't expect me to write you a custom module just because you don't know how to plan correctly. BTW, this is not directed at anyone personally, just a global thing that annoys me sometimes :) .
The problem is not in quality of answers, but rather in quality of questions.
70% of askers asking for complicated changes in openerp.
But at the same time from quality of theirs questions i noticing, that they have not enough knowledge for such complicated tasks. (not enough info, without base approach).
As a result of this, it's not worth the bother to write long answer with complete solution. For all those, who just waiting for easy fast solutions for their tasks.
The problem is the quality of questions and interactions. Most of the time it looks more like a forum than a Q&A.
The way to improve that is to have serious moderation by:
- Odoo dedicated people/time to moderate the site. Community volunteers have a role to play, but alone that's not a solution.
- The site lacks some features to help moderators do that work. For example, the "convert answer to comment" is not available anymore. The important would be to have an ongoing collabaration with community moderatos to spot that type of problem and improve the tools accordingly. Again, permanent support from Odoo people.
If we were to go more specific, maybe many individual changes could be names, but the above would allow to support them and provide sustained improvement for the site and it's content.
Thanks for the feedback. We will improve all technical improvements reported on the forum (actually, a lot has already been improved and will be active at the next upgrade of the saas).
People that use the forum are starting with Odoo, so they have no idea about the topics that users talk. Maybe, a good idea would be to separate the forums as Fabien said (functional and development). Also, it would be great if Odoo provide some experimented users, so they can give us good answers to our issues.
There are already several prominent Odoo people (as well as very skilled community members) present on the board, but most of the questions do not need these people to answer them. I found there are different type of questions. Those who just post a simple question (or sometimes just a title!) with little to no effort of looking through documentation. Those who post a big chunk of code and simply ask you to fix it and people who post serious questions that need custom code to satisfy their needs. Perhaps the last category can be answered by professional Odoo user, but most likely these adjustments will not be simple and therefor the professional people do not have and/or can't make the time to answer them.
I think so. The solution would be, for those users, hire companies that can support development of Open - Odoo.
+1 Ludo and Juan: skilled Odooers with help on good questions, but won't waste time on questions showing no research effort or people asking to fix their custom code here.
Well for one OpenERP is a pretty mature program as of now and there are many ways to do things. I struggled a bit getting over the learning curve but reverse engineering and the technical memento has helped a great bit. I cant say I got any help from the forum thus far maybe because my questions are very involved.
I think splitting the forum into practical and development sections would be helpful.
I also agree with Ludo - Neobis
So far i have spent about 160+hours developing a module, and I have hit a few snags, but as programming goes I was always able to find an answer between existing modules/1 answer on this forum/and the documentation.
I also think that instead of dumping all 16+k questions into one page they should be organized into a legit forum, broken down into topics of discussion.
Splitting the questions according to topics is the rule of the tags. But we have to rethink them since it doesn't work efficiently. (Duplicate tags, complex to follow a tag, ...)
The problem is also with the Q&A software and moderation etc. I prefer to use Stack Exchange for openerp related questions because it is a much more mature product and you get better quality answers. Perhaps we should just use that, or propose a separate community site on http://area51.stackexchange.com/ ?
Hi all,
I'm currently developping a forum (phpBB like), but at this moment we are still using V7.0 in my company .
We need it in my company to allow employees to share knowledge, find solution, or just discuss about company's future and investments.
The forum is fully integrated inside OpenERP like the POS. There is still a lot of work to do, I think I could launch it for production during August.
Once launched and used, I'll make it available for the community, but I need some time.
Forum will come with moderation rights, groups, announces, profiles, subforums, and so on.
It will not be so enhanced as the real one (phpBB or Vbulletin), but I plan to make it functional and user friendly.
About this actual forum :
- only one answer per question is allowed : this (stupid) function will not figure in my module ;o)
- answers and comments are not well ordered so that follow a discussion is not easy at all. I'm pretty sure people give up because of the order of the posts.
Regards
Thierry, this is not a forum in the classical sense (phpBB, SMF etc.). It's more of an Q&A platform, similar to stackexchange and askbot. It makes sense to have answers sorted by upvotes instead of time.
@leonardo, I do understand, but I do not agree. it's very complicated when you now that there is a new answer but you have to crawl all the thread to read it. If newest were on top, you can find it easily. I gave up some times when I saw that I have a new answer but it takes 5 minutes to get it ... not very useful
Suggestion:
Maybe there could be a sort of a guidance on how to ask a question. Currently we see a lot of posts that sometimes only have a title, something like "Reports in OpenERP .... !!!!!!". That's not even a question! Since most of us have no glass orb to tell fortune's we still need to depend on information provided by the one asking the question.
A simple guidance of 3 things to fill in would go a long way I suppose:
- What did you encounter?
- What did you expect?
- What have you tried already?
This in my opinion is the absolute minimum to be filled in in order not to waste everyone's time. All these points can even be answered by a simple sentence, yet it saves people a lot of time.
By the way, a general thumbs up for those who still take the time to answer 1-sentence questions. I admire your patience and desire to help people out.
There is "Read Guidelines" in the top right.
@Daniel: I never noticed, thanks :) .
60% of the questions have an answer which is not bad.
IMHO one answer for question is very limitative and changing answer into comment makes thread incomprensible.
Another interesting feature may be searching title in forum before opening a new thread. Some user asks before reading.
There is no "one answer por question" limitation: I'm counting 6 answers now for this one.
Yes, there are 6 and more answer but you can just write one answer and unlimited comments like this.
60% of the questions have an answer which is not bad. I agree with tolstoj; the problem is mostly related to the quality of the questions. Some questions are not clear (bad english), others require development to answer. I once hesitated to split the forum in two forums; functional and development. But I am not sure it's a good idea.
60% of the questions have an answer which is not bad. I agree with tolstoj; the problem is mostly related to the quality of the questions. Some questions are not clear (bad english), others require development to answer. I once hesitated to split the forum in two forums; functional and development. But I am not sure it's a good idea.
Fabien, thanks for commenting! The thing is, that number (60%) is not true, since there is no easy way to comment on questions, at least not if you have a "low karma", it's just like Alex said: makes it harder to get a dialogue going. What happens is people "answer" with further questions or to "bump" their threads in the hope someone will come to help. Those kind of posts mark the question as "answered" on your analytics, while they were actually NOT answered!
You can take a look at this very thread on the forum. People "answered" my question with further discussion. Those answeres, while I have not marked them as THE ANSWER to my question, are showing up on the main forum as valid answers to my question... That bumps up the questions/answers ratio in the wrong direction ^^
Yes, we will improve and add a convert to comment feature to requalify wrong answers. It's already developed and will appear in a few week, after the next upgrade.
I agree, the forum is great and somtimes I see astonishing detailed and precise answers. But in my opinion, some major functionality is missing (compared to stackoverflow e.g.) like comment voting.
A small note: we would be very happy if some community members can do a pull request on master to improve the forum.
A small note: we would be very happy if some community members can do a pull request on master to improve the forum.