How to follow conversations on community

[#1]

A Quick Primer

Questions are... the basic content type on community. One user can ask a question, and other users can provide answers, comment on answers, or upvote answers they think are good. The question-asker or a moderator can come back and mark one or more answer as the "accepted solution."   This is by far the most common content type on community. 

Discussions are... for more free-form conversations that don't really have the concept of a problem with a solution. They can be framed as questions too, but tend to be of a more conversational nature. Our weekly Friday fun threads, discussions about different use cases for products, or suggestions from users can all be discussions. 

Articles are... for more blog-like content. Only Atlassians, Community Champions, Vendors, and Partners can write articles at this time.  Product or community announcements, how-tos, expert advice, and showcases of our members all come in the form of articles. 

How To's

Browsing collections and groups

The Products, Interests, and Groups drop-down will show some of our most popular product and interest collections. 

     

Click "See all" to browse the complete list. Once you're in a collection, you can filter to see questions, discussions, articles, or all three.  You can view by trending, most liked, most viewed, or most recent. 

Watching collections

If you want to keep tabs on what's going on in a collection, you can watch it.  The easiest way is to click Watch in the sidebar and choose to get updates via email. You can also get RSS links if you prefer!

Personalizing your homepage feed

This feature lets you specify exactly what kind of content you want to see on the homepage. Do you only want to see questions with no replies tagged jira-service-desk that are in the Confluence collection for some reason? You can!  This is the best place to filter for content with a certain tag. 

Go to community.atlassian.com to set up your homepage feed. The community will remember your preferences once you set them. You can click "Reset" to restore the defaults at any time.

Searching and setting up search alerts

A search alert is a notification that you receive when new content matching your preferred search query is added.

You can create a search alert by clicking "Create alert" in the sidebar any time you search for content on community.

You can add, delete, or manage your search alerts by clicking avatar and then View profile > Adjust notifications > Search alerts

Adjusting your notifications

Click on your avatar and then Manage settings > Notifications  

This handy view will let you see what you're watching, manage your search alerts (see below for more on that) or, if you click Settings, adjust your settings.  If you're following busy collections, you may want to adjust the frequency of your notifications. Another option would be to use email filters to manage the information being sent by community. 

Viewing your activity feed

Your activity feed is this box next to your avatar:

Click "see all activity" to get to this page and browse all your notifications.

Using the API

Do you want to get fancy and build an integration with the community API?  Click here for more about using the API.

Thank you

I hope this guide has been helpful! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them below. 🕺🏿

[Davin Studer]

Nice guide for new people. I sent someone I work with to this article as a primer on how to use the community.

FYI, one of your images is broken under "Browsing collections and groups".

[Monique vdB]

@Davin Studer so glad it was useful! I think I removed the broken image link. 🤞🏻

[Fadoua]

@Monique vdByou forgot to include the link "click here for more about using API".  Well detailed topic!

[Monique vdB]

@Fadoua thanks for catching this! Will update, but the link is here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Feedback-Forum-articles/Use-the-Community-API-to-query-tags/ba-p/618155

[Fadoua]

Thank you @Monique vdB!

[Paulo Alves]

Great article, I think it will help some new members.

[Budi Tanjung]

distribusi gramedia informal yang produktif

[Amber_Sparkles]

Newbie here - be kind lol
I found this by a google search that led me here (awesome)
signed up now stumped...
found good things i want to follow or watch, and i'm not sure how to do so....help?

edit:
maybe because it is not under community, but a specific software's features and issues section....
idk, any noob suggestions are welcome (including if I am not posting this in right place)

[G subramanyam]

This is really helpful and thank you for sharing the link @Monique vdB 

[Yogita Chhaya]

Very good information

[David Bakkers]

There seems to be an issue when trying to restrict a search of the Community site for threads on a particular Product with a particular tag. The search result spans all Products, not just the specified one.

For example, if I select the Product 'Jira' and narrow my range to the tag 'rest-api' the resulting URL is "https://community.atlassian.com/t5/tag/rest-api/tg-p/category-id/jira"

But, the search results show all threads with the tag 'rest-api' across multiple Products, not just Jira:

Am I missing something on how to make a search specific to one Product only for a particular tag?

[Steven Dastine]

just learn how does it work, hopefully it can be useful to add knowledge and be creative

[olgaostap]

Thank you for the article! Please, could you clarify if it is possible to watch not only one page or the whole space, but the certain page + all its child-pages in certain space?