Is there a way to create, edit, limit the topics of the question?

[Hung Dinh]

I know that topic in confluence questions works like Jira/confluence labels, however to keep questions well organized, topics should be managed/managed by admin, like Atlassian is handling the tags in here (answers.atlassian.com)

Is there a way to do this? Will this feature available in the official release, and what is the EST for stable release?

[Puja Deverakonda]

Hi Sam -- thanks for your response. The use case is that at my company we organize our knowledge base around knowledge type, rather than team. We do this to encourage cross-functional thinking.

I'd like to structure Questions the same way -- but since people are so prone to thinking in teams, we want to restrict topics to require that people center on a topic. The way the software works right now is counter to this -- if someone types in the name of a team (instead of selecting a featured topic), then it shows up as a trending topic, then the next person uses it, and soon it's showing up both in our Questions list, and also when someone is going to ask a question (so actually, on the same interface as a "featured topic" -- partially why that feature doesn't help).

Another problem is that is someone creates a new topic, nobody is going to see that unless they're watching the ENTIRE Questions feature. Since we're relying on email to drive traffic to our instance, we don't want to bombard people by asking them to watch the whole forum, and we also want people to have a good experience (i.e., have their question answered) when they first use it.

The ability to restrict who can create a topic would be a huge step forward and would really enable us to both scale and increase adoption of our instance.

[john]

Hello Hung - currently anyone can edit topics on questions, however, this will almost certainly change by the time 1.0 ships.

On Answers.atlassian.com, users can unlock the ability to edit/add topics after they have earned enough karma, so its actually the community, not Atlassian, that manages this. We will likely do a similar thing with Confluence Questions, where users with more points can edit topics. If you have suggestions about how this should work, we'd love to hear them. Add an issue to our public issue tracker here.

Sign up for the beta to receive notifications about pricing and timing of the official release here: atlassian.com/questions

[MichaelS]

Hi John,

1.0 is out now. As far as I can see, it's still the case that there is no way to define/organize the available topics, right? Is this on the roadmap?

[Puja Deverakonda]

Hi Sam -- thanks for your response. The use case is that at my company we organize our knowledge base around knowledge type, rather than team. We do this to encourage cross-functional thinking.

I'd like to structure Questions the same way -- but since people are so prone to thinking in teams, we want to restrict topics to require that people center on a topic. The way the software works right now is counter to this -- if someone types in the name of a team (instead of selecting a featured topic), then it shows up as a trending topic, then the next person uses it, and soon it's showing up both in our Questions list, and also when someone is going to ask a question (so actually, on the same interface as a "featured topic" -- partially why that feature doesn't help).

We have done some advertising and training around how to use the forum, but I'd rather focus my time on teaching people to build pages in Confluence.

The ability to restrict who can create a topic would be a huge step forward and would really enable us to both scale and increase adoption of our instance.

[Puja Deverakonda]

I'd like to know whether you can restrict the ability to create topics. We'd like to create 'conversation centers' around certain knowledge areas and not have people create their own topics. How can we accomplish this?

[Sam Tardif]

We have the concept of "featured topics", where you can promote specific topics in the product. Featured topics are made more prominent on the Ask Question page and on the topics index.

This way you can elevate a set of topics above the others for "conversation centers", but users will still be able to create their own topics. Would that work for you?

We've got an issue open for restricting topic creation in the way you describe, too: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-517