I really want to thank everyone for being patient and largely positive (or at least constructive) about our new system. Overall, this is one of the best post-launch days I've had on any community. Thank you, all of you.
I wanted to also highlight two of the new content types and features this new system brings to us, and encourage you all to try them out. We're all really excited about giving you a lot more freedom to create and share your knowledge.
Documents
Many of you have seen that I've been posting some documents on how to use the system, as well as converting some threads to documents. Well, this is for all of you to do too, not just me! Documents are just a more formal name for wikis. They are meant to be informational -- to define a term, to solve a problem, to give information on a subject. My hope is that our documents become a robust technology encyclopedia and a source of fantastic and useful tips.
All of you can write and edit documents. You don't have to be a moderator or administrator, just a member of the community.
You can also convert a discussion thread into a document by clicking the "Convert to Document" selection in the Actions menu on the right side of the thread. This will load the thread contents into the document template, and you can edit down from there. The system will automatically create a link back to the thread that the document came from, and you should leave that. Then tag it, set any collaboration options, and submit for approval.
(I approve all documents, and I'm only looking for Community Standards violations.)
Blogs
Well, you are reading this, so you are halfway there on blogs already! You can start your own blog, or contribute to a subject blog. To contribute to a subject blog, just let me know which you'd like to write in. You can start your own blog by going to New, then Blogs, then clicking the link to create a personal blog. Write about whatever you'd like, as long as it's within our community standards.
Questions
When you are posting a thread that is a question, please consider marking it as a question. All new threads are automatically questions by default. This allows you to later designate "correct" and "helpful" answers, and gives the people that wrote those answers points. It's a way of saying "thank you" to people who helped you, and encourages people to continue helping others. Don't forget to come back and award points once your problem is solved!
Tags
When starting a new discussion thread, document or blog post, you can tag your content. I encourage you to do this, as it creates a rich system for finding related content in our community. Tagging content is easy and quick, but the benefits are huge.
Thanks again for your patience and questions. I'll be using this blog to update about changes in the community as well as to communicate changes about the site in general.
