Is there a way to pre-create/pre-populate a list of topics for use when beginning to utilize the Questions function?

[Jonathan Beattie]

I'm about to start using Questions for my team and am curious if I can pre-populate a list of allowable topic tags for use by team members?

[TomC]

Hi Jonathan,

We pre-populated our Questions instance with over 70 topics - to do so, you click the Add Topic button on the 'Topics' page (just click the Topics tab to get there.

Just keep in mind that users aren't restricted to choosing those topics (there is no 'lock down', and we're fine with that (we have thousands of employees and know the topics might fall outside our pre-pop'd ones).  You can however list featured topics that do show up on all questions asked, so again if you have a small number of topics you want folks to focus on, that might be an option.

As a sort of hack if your team and list of topics is small enough, as you may know you can assign Question topics within prescribed wiki pages using the Questions macro. Your cover Confluence page can be a child macro that links to each Topic page. When someone clicks the 'Ask Question' link in the particular page, it has the particular pre-populated topic assigned. Pros and cons with that approach, but we use it occasionally, such as for project pilots and so forth.

[Jonathan Beattie]

Thanks @Tom Crespi! I'm not seeing a 'Topics Page' - could you help direct me to this? My Questions space looks like the below:

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping to pre-populate ~150 topics before adding ~100-200 users to the Questions space, so I would love to know how to do this.

image2017-3-24 12:44:9.png

[TomC]

Hi @Jonathan Beattie It appears you are using the Questions List macro within a space (called "Trading Partners Wiki") or some other mechanism to display the Questions functionality. We use a theme that masks base Confluence so your screenshot is not familiar to me, but can you get to the landing page for Questions by clicking on the Questions link in the left nav bar?  Alternatively, the 'main page' for questions for us is at https://[core-domain].com/questions.

In any case, I have the Topics link in a menu level above the 'Popular, Recent, Unanswered' one as shown below.  I believe the Experts and/or Statistics menu items may only be available to Confluence admins, but all users can see the Topics list. Admins OR those who earn the requisite reputation points (if you have turned that one) may be the only ones who can create new topics in advance and/or select Featured Topics.

image2017-3-24 13:52:42.png

[Jonathan Beattie]

Hey @crespi , thanks for the help here! I figured out that I had to have someone with admin rights pre-populate this list for me.

I was wondering if you do any reporting on your Questions space. I've asked another question about this here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/What-kinds-of-reports-can-I-run-in-my-Questions-space/qaq-p/458496, but have not gotten any responses. I'm hoping to launch my Questions space across 5+ teams in about a week, but many of the teams want to know how we can do reporting to see who from their team is contributing to the Questions space.

Any help you could provide on that Question would be greatly appreciated!

[Jonathan Beattie]

Hey Tom, one more question for you too: Do you know if it's possible for people answering Questions to add new topic tags to that question?

I can see this as making the searchability more robust and could possibly help with my reporting question above as well.

Thanks again!

[TomC]

Hi Jonathan,

Good questions!  Funny you asked about reporting. My boss basically wants the exact same thing and this person also. My suspicion is that this is under high demand - maybe we should launch a feature request for it. 

As to your question about whether people answering questions can add or edit topics, yes and no. Admins can always be asked to do that (and I happen to be one) but the community can as well IF they achieve certain levels of reputation points, it's 500 points for editing topics (aka 'reputation-based permissions').

See the full list of reputation-based permissions in Questions here:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/questions/permissions-407724476.html#Permissions-RepBasedPermissions

[Jonathan Beattie]

Thanks again for the help here Tom! My company is actually in the pocess of moving to host JIRA & Confluence in-house so I'm guessing I'd need to submit a new feature request inernally here to get that done. If not, how would we submit a new feature request for this?