What do you think of asking for a product version for a question?

[Maarten Cautreels]

A reply to a question that I commonly see is: "What version are you on?" or "Are you on Server or on Cloud?"

Could we add this to the form of a Question so that users are required to at least pick either Server or Cloud and maybe even a version (for Server).

This could really help finding the right answer quicker.

What does the rest of the Community think?

Best,

Maarten

[Sam Hall]

I think just asking for a basic product name on all questions would be really helpful, but only if it makes it very easy for users to pick the right thing, and guides them when not sure.

The product picker at https://support.atlassian.com/contact/ does something like this:

I'd argue that capturing a product name in more structured way like this would benefit askers, answerers and searchers in this community enough to be worth the extra effort needed to raise a question.

Subjectively, it feels like there are many questions that are uncategorised / lacking product details because the asker doesn't add a basic tag for the product. I guess they just create a new question without first going into one of the product 'collections'.

To be fair, these usually get sorted out by the helpful contributors on here, but it does take effort that feels a bit unnecessary.

This is all subjective, of course! I'm sure Atlassian are monitoring the numbers of uncategorised questions and whether that has an impact on answer rate and speed to resolution. Would be interesting to know if there are stats.

I also think it would be great if questions could have an (optional) "Affects Version/s" field in the style of JIRA, but I think it would take a lot of community effort to get it accurately populated.

[Daniel Eads _unmonitored account_]

To be fair, these usually get sorted out by the helpful contributors on here, but it does take effort that feels a bit unnecessary.

Totally agreed - I think I spend more time doing this than actually answering questions.

[Daniel Eads _unmonitored account_]

I also think it would be great if questions could have an (optional) "Affects Version/s" field in the style of JIRA, but I think it would take a lot of community effort to get it accurately populated.

Hearing the same feedback from another AUG leader about answers/versioning. I haven't seen this really solved in any other communities/forums on the internet; just figured checking the post date and thinking "how old is my currently installed version" was kind of par for the course. But as the schizm between Server and Cloud widens, this does seem to be more important and worth some focus.

[Daniel Eads _unmonitored account_]

In the words of Arnold: