If you've been in the community awhile, you probably follow tags related to your favorite topics -- so you can stay on top of questions and blog posts tied to your areas of expertise and interest. (If I've already lost you with that first sentence, I encourage you to take our Tour the SAP Community 2022 tutorial, as Step 3 explains everything you need to know about following tags.) And if you've ever noticed content in your main feeds that didn't trigger notifications based upon your #communications settings, you may have wondered why you don't always get the alerts you expect. Well, I'm happy to report that, moving forward (with the right notification settings), you'll never miss out on the content with the tags that mean the most to you!
Before I get into all that (and give you some tips in case you find yourself dealing with more notifications than you want), I should explain how the system worked previously -- and how it will work from now on.
When publishing a question or a blog post in the community, members may select up to seven managed tags. But in the past, only the first managed tag selected would trigger notifications for members who followed that tag -- as presumably that was the primary tag for the content in the eyes of the author. If you followed any of the other managed tags selected for the content (and you didn't follow the first managed tag that the poster selected), you wouldn't have received any notifications.
I realize that may sound confusing, so I'll illustrate.
Let's say I prepared a blog post and tagged as follows (in this order):
If you had been following the SAP Business Technology Platform tag, you would have received a notification -- because it was the first tag I selected for my post, and only the first tag would trigger a notification. If you followed any of the other six tags (but not the SAP Business Technology Platform tag), you would not have been alerted.
That was before. Here's how things will work from now: If you follow any of the tags chosen for a question or blog post, regardless of the order in which the tags are selected, you'll receive a notification -- and only one notification, selected based on the order in which the poster picks the tags.
Going back to my sample post above (as an example): If you follow the SAP HANA, SAP IQ, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud tags (but none of the other four tags in that example), you'll receive one notification, not three, and it will be SAP HANA that triggers the alert, as the author (i.e., yours truly in this case) chose that before SAP IQ and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. (Granted, you might say that SAP S/4HANA is more important to you than SAP HANA, so you would prefer that the default goes to the latter, but I'm afraid the system functions based on order selected. On the positive side, once you check out the content, you can see all the tags associated with it and know whether it covers several things that interest you -- which is way better than missing out on the content altogether (or getting up to seven notifications for a single piece of content!).)
With this change, we reduce the risk that members will miss content that appeals to them. It will, however, likely mean an increase in the number of notifications you receive -- especially if you follow dozens of tags.
With that in mind, you may want to modify your notification settings to tweak the volume of updates, because once you follow a tag, regardless of whether you clicked "follow" from the Q&A or blogging area, you'll get a notification whenever any new question or blog post is published with that tag. So if you like answering questions quickly (but aren't so keen on reading a blog post as soon as it goes live), you may want to leave on email notifications for "New questions in tags I follow" but turn them off for "New blog posts in tags I follow." Or vice versa.
Another option (if you find your email is getting too out of control): You can turn off e-mail notifications and leave them on only for your #inbox.
Play with the possibilities until you get the volume and frequency of notifications that accommodate you best. As shown in the image below, you can manage notifications by accessing your Former Member tutorial, as Step 7 covers notifications at length.
On the moderation side, we'll monitor to make sure that content creators aren't taking advantage of this change by "over-tagging," meaning selecting a bunch of popular (and unrelated) tags in the hopes of reaching the biggest possible audience. When necessary, we caution bloggers and question posters against this approach, and we always request that they only choose tags relevant to the topics covered in their content. (That's why my tagging example above is just an example -- as it's highly unlikely that a blogger could honestly claim that a post covers all seven of those topics, although I suppose stranger things have happened!) Still, if you happen to catch members using tags that don't apply to what they've written about, you can report their content for incorrect tagging via the "Alert Moderator" functionality.
Here's how it looks for blogging (with a sample message of what you might report, how, and why -- again using my blog post above as an example):
I hope this notifications update will make it easier for you to stay connected to the topics that interest you most! And speaking of topics that interest you most: You'll notice in the previous two images, I used "SAP Community" as an example of an incorrect tag. That happens a lot. In this case, I'd like to think I tagged this post correctly, so if you enjoy receiving notifications about this type of information, please make sure to follow the SAP Community tag. I do!
I also encourage you to follow me (I don't write as much as I used to, but when I do, it's to share news about the community), and to leave any questions or comments below.
Before I get into all that (and give you some tips in case you find yourself dealing with more notifications than you want), I should explain how the system worked previously -- and how it will work from now on.
When publishing a question or a blog post in the community, members may select up to seven managed tags. But in the past, only the first managed tag selected would trigger notifications for members who followed that tag -- as presumably that was the primary tag for the content in the eyes of the author. If you followed any of the other managed tags selected for the content (and you didn't follow the first managed tag that the poster selected), you wouldn't have received any notifications.
I realize that may sound confusing, so I'll illustrate.
Let's say I prepared a blog post and tagged as follows (in this order):
If you had been following the SAP Business Technology Platform tag, you would have received a notification -- because it was the first tag I selected for my post, and only the first tag would trigger a notification. If you followed any of the other six tags (but not the SAP Business Technology Platform tag), you would not have been alerted.
That was before. Here's how things will work from now: If you follow any of the tags chosen for a question or blog post, regardless of the order in which the tags are selected, you'll receive a notification -- and only one notification, selected based on the order in which the poster picks the tags.
Going back to my sample post above (as an example): If you follow the SAP HANA, SAP IQ, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud tags (but none of the other four tags in that example), you'll receive one notification, not three, and it will be SAP HANA that triggers the alert, as the author (i.e., yours truly in this case) chose that before SAP IQ and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. (Granted, you might say that SAP S/4HANA is more important to you than SAP HANA, so you would prefer that the default goes to the latter, but I'm afraid the system functions based on order selected. On the positive side, once you check out the content, you can see all the tags associated with it and know whether it covers several things that interest you -- which is way better than missing out on the content altogether (or getting up to seven notifications for a single piece of content!).)
With this change, we reduce the risk that members will miss content that appeals to them. It will, however, likely mean an increase in the number of notifications you receive -- especially if you follow dozens of tags.
With that in mind, you may want to modify your notification settings to tweak the volume of updates, because once you follow a tag, regardless of whether you clicked "follow" from the Q&A or blogging area, you'll get a notification whenever any new question or blog post is published with that tag. So if you like answering questions quickly (but aren't so keen on reading a blog post as soon as it goes live), you may want to leave on email notifications for "New questions in tags I follow" but turn them off for "New blog posts in tags I follow." Or vice versa.
Another option (if you find your email is getting too out of control): You can turn off e-mail notifications and leave them on only for your #inbox.
Play with the possibilities until you get the volume and frequency of notifications that accommodate you best. As shown in the image below, you can manage notifications by accessing your Former Member tutorial, as Step 7 covers notifications at length.
On the moderation side, we'll monitor to make sure that content creators aren't taking advantage of this change by "over-tagging," meaning selecting a bunch of popular (and unrelated) tags in the hopes of reaching the biggest possible audience. When necessary, we caution bloggers and question posters against this approach, and we always request that they only choose tags relevant to the topics covered in their content. (That's why my tagging example above is just an example -- as it's highly unlikely that a blogger could honestly claim that a post covers all seven of those topics, although I suppose stranger things have happened!) Still, if you happen to catch members using tags that don't apply to what they've written about, you can report their content for incorrect tagging via the "Alert Moderator" functionality.
Here's how it looks for blogging (with a sample message of what you might report, how, and why -- again using my blog post above as an example):
I hope this notifications update will make it easier for you to stay connected to the topics that interest you most! And speaking of topics that interest you most: You'll notice in the previous two images, I used "SAP Community" as an example of an incorrect tag. That happens a lot. In this case, I'd like to think I tagged this post correctly, so if you enjoy receiving notifications about this type of information, please make sure to follow the SAP Community tag. I do!
I also encourage you to follow me (I don't write as much as I used to, but when I do, it's to share news about the community), and to leave any questions or comments below.
- SAP Managed Tags:
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