Community release notes for January 8, 2025

[#1]

Hi friends!

We're in the process of making some navigation and IA updates that I want to share with you as they may impact your community experience.  

In short, these changes are part of a move to simplify our community structure and make the use of our content types more straightforward. More changes will be coming to add even more consistency and clarity to the forum, but we soft-launched a few you may have already spotted in the nav bar. 

Updated: "Products" has now been renamed to "Product Q&A" to make it more clear that this is the question & answer area of the community.  (In case you're wondering about articles, we'll be testing the addition of an "Articles" link to the nav bar as well. For now, find articles at this link.) 

Updated: Since most users (about 90%) come to the site with questions about our products, we made a change to the "Ask the community" drop-down. It's been changed to "Ask a question" and immediately takes you to the form to ask a question.   

Updated: We've been slowly deprecating discussions in these product Q&A areas, and directing folks to our groups for discussions. We made this change because we found that the discussion type was confusing, and mostly led to users posting their questions as discussions by accident. This meant our question answerers were much less likely to see them and the user would get no response. Without discussions, we can ensure user questions don't get lost and instead get answered quickly! (Thank you as always to all the answerers out there. 💙) 

Creating discussions is still easy - each group has a "Let's discuss" button that you can click to start a discussion.  If there's no group that seems like the right fit for your topic, let us know and we can help direct you!

                   

Updated: Some of you may have been used to using the dropdown to write articles.  The updated article workflow is as follows:

In product Q&A collections: 

1. Navigate to the appropriate product collection by clicking Product Q&A
2. Click on the "Articles" tab in the collection and then "Start an article" in the sidebar as shown on the screenshot

In groups:

Click the "Write an article" button in the right rail and use the "Options" drop-down to find your drafts.

Plus: As a bonus, now that the "global" article experience has been retired, you will no longer encounter any errors in trying to save your drafts!

Thanks so much for rolling with these changes as we strive to make the community more useful for everyone! And feedback, suggestions, compliments, and questions are welcomed, as always, in the comments below.

Thanks!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Monique vdB 

Thanks to you and the team for the updates!

As the "discussion" option is being slowly deprecated in the Product Q&A area, will the "ask a question" option be deprecated in the Groups area for the same reasons you noted?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Ollie Guan]

The new way to ask questions is more similar to a contact support form, which is friendlier to new users and can help accurately locate products/types, etc.

[Monique vdB]

@Bill Sheboy yes that's the idea! Just considering how to implement it. For example, in the Jira Admin group, "Ask a question" could take users directly to the Jira Q&A board and it would be a seamless experience. But of course our groups don't map 1:1 to products so maybe an all-purpose module would be better.

Or just removing Q&A altogether and leaving "Ask a question" in the nav. We're looking at options for sure and some data around how our users interact in groups, and appreciate the hint that we're on the right track 😉