Administration Training: Administrative Roles and Tools

Admin Training Checklist

• Explain platform features
• Set Initial community structure/spaces
• Configure Mail settings
• Questions & Answers
• Idea voting & lifecycle
• Knowledge Based Articles
• Confirm moderation & content leaders

Administrative Training Objective

The objective is to provide an overview of the platform, help you understand the basic operation and how configuration changes will affect the user experience.

Community Visibility Dependent on Administrative Features

User Facing Front-End Community Interface: Provides an overview of the front-end UI in the community and explains how permissions and feature settings affect each feature.

Access Experience: Varies whether the community is public or private.

• If private, the admin must create user accounts. The other option is to create them through SSO to provide access for users. Content will not be visible unless the user signs in.
• If public, sites are visible by default (you can change this) and include a path for new users to register.

Discussing the Basics for Initial Setup of User-Facing AH Community Features

User Profile Page

The user profile page contains the following information:

• Optional personal information/Bio (about me)
• Uploaded avatar
• Activity feed
• Topics of Interest
• Badges earned
• Reputation Points
• Number of Users Following/Followers
• % Correct
• Number of Questions, Answers, Comments, Favorited content
• A link to your subscriptions to Topics, Questions, Articles, Ideas, Users, and Spaces

Preferences

Navigation to each Preference Tab: Avatar Drop-down > My Preferences > [Insert Tab Names Below]

• Site Preferences tab: Editor preference (depending on Admin setting) and language the user wants the UI rendered in. Note the content remains in the language the user posted it in.
• Notifications tab: Overrides to the community-wide settings in the admin for email notifications, automatic follower settings, and additional miscellaneous notification settings.
• Expertise Settings tab: Allows user or admin to mark expertise related to particular topic areas.
• Alteregos tab: Only available to admins/moderators unless expressly granted. This allows the user to impersonate another user while posting/editing. This is currently limited to Q&A and commenting/editing other types.
• Details tab: Contains text fields to enter basic information about the user.
• Authentication Modes tab: To add new authentication modes besides the username and password, navigate to Admin Console > Users & Groups > Settings > Authentication Modes. The social media authentication options require you to also configure them by navigating to Plugins > API Connections.

Content types

Q&A, Articles, Ideas: Principle differences and features:

• Question, Answer, Comments: Accepted solution, wikify, close, lock comments, redirect, edit history.
• Articles: Comments, parent / child relationship and auto-populating index.
• Ideas: State based, workflow and awards of votes and reputation points by state for various involved parties.

Create content: From the CREATE drop-down, you can select to create a Question (Ask a question selection), Create an Article, or Post an Idea.

• The options to create content on each space may vary depending upon the type of group and permission settings for the user. You can lock it to a single content type, or even revoke it altogether to create read only spaces, or spaces where users may only vote, comment or post answers to existing content.
• Each content type has an editor that allows you to add text, embed images, attachments and a text field to add a topic, drop-down to select a space, and a post button. After posting, you have several options to edit your post through the gear menu and the More link on comments. We will explore all these options in more detail during content and moderation training.

Navigating Through Content
There are three principle ways to navigate through content in AnswerHub:

1. Through the search bar.
2. Browsing through spaces.
3. Selecting a topic.

Spaces: Logical containers that can support any combination of content types. Spaces are the principle way to provide structure and organization in a community and other systems may call them "forums" or "boards." Most users who have participated in online communities will appreciate some structure. Spaces can support sub-spaces under them. Other systems may call these categories and boards. Out-of-the-box, AnswerHub ships with two spaces, help and default, and it is easy to add others. When posting content, users have the ability to select which space their content will go into, without first having navigated to that space. This is a feature not typically found in other systems. Spaces are also a good way to control access to content through the interaction between user/group permissions for each space. We'll explore spaces more when discussing the admin console view.

Navigation widget (the vertical tree diagram):

• Topics: This is one of three navigation facets. Tagging topics creates organization of content into spaces. This takes you to a page where all topics are listed - you can sort and click through to find all content tagged with that topic. Each topic has its own page that can be given a description and topic icon.
• Navigate to all Content Types: All questions, ideas, and articles, regardless of what spaces they are posted in. For questions, this surfaces additional filtering to view all questions or all unanswered questions. You can select whether "unanswered" means no answer or not correct answer (accepted answer) in the admin console; this setting changes the front-end experience.
• Users: The users page displays the default list of users in the system with different sorting filters; default sort is by reputation. Single diamonds near the username reflects moderator, double diamonds are super user / admin. Reputation points and badges earned (gold, silver, bronze) are also shown per user.

📘

TIP:

As a site becomes established, this is an easy way to stratify users. What percent of users have double-digit or higher reputation scores? This can act as an easy way to benchmark growth on engagement and to see if a broader number of highly involved users. You also want to pay attention to the top users on the site - those with 3 and 4 digit reputation scores. Typically, these users are the helpful experts that answer many questions on the site and you should consider them for a recognition/advocacy program. When you enable the leaderboard plugin, it replaces this tiled view with a ranked list that shows positional changes based on the selected timeframe. This is a way to spot movement of rising stars - those that are more recently active and earning reputation points versus those that have already amassed a large number and would otherwise just remain at the top.

Badges: Shows a list of all the badges users can earn in the system and a brief description of the activity they represent. Next to each badge is a number that illustrates the number of members that have earned it. Clicking the number displays the users who have earned it. This is a way to identify members of the community that are exhibiting certain behaviors that you want to encourage. Communities need different types of participation, such as problem solving. In this instance, you might look for members who earned the "Alex Trebek" badge for providing three or more right answers. Members in a community like to receive acknowledgement and feedback, so you might look for users who comment frequently and have earned the "Statler and Waldorf" badge. You might also want to see a community that will curate knowledge, edits and updates to existing content. Look for those who earned the "Strunk and White" badge.