Best practice for asking great questions (and getting brilliant answers!)
If you need help from other SS&C Blue Prism experts, following the best practice in this guide will help you get highly personalized and detailed answers!
⚠️ Note: This guide does not cover how to create a post. For guidance on creating a post, see here.
What makes a question great?
We read a lot of questions and answers, and we've noticed a few things that you can do to help everyone reading your question to give you fantastic advice:
- Write a great title
- Make your question easy to understand
- Explain what you have already tried
- Use good formatting
- Associate your question with a product
Let's cover them one-by-one!
Writing a great title
The title of your post is incredibly important - it is always the first thing that other people read (when they receive a notification about your post, or see it on the home page), and will let them know whether or not they have the knowledge to help you.
The best way to write a great title is to think about how you would ask your question if you only had 3 seconds.
💡Hint: If you're having trouble writing a title, write it after you've written your post!
Examples:
☑️Good: How do I enable automatic Machine Learning training in Decipher?
🚫 Bad: Help me with Decipher
☑️Good: What does "Failed to add items to queue due to memory buffer" mean?
🚫 Bad: Memory buffer error
Making your question easy to understand
When we ask the people who answer questions in our community "what makes answering difficult?", their number one response is:
"Having to ask the author lots of questions just to understand what they need!"
Making sure that what you need from others is clear and easy to understand is the number 1 thing you can do to get great advice from our community. The best way to achieve this is to make sure that you include a specific question in your post.
For example:
In this post, it's very clear what advice Tejaskumar needs:
"Is there anything that can alert users when something is off with the bots and connection, so that the team can go look"?
Anyone reading this post can immediately decide whether or not they have the expertise to answer it, and exactly what information to provide that will help Tejaskumar solve his question.
There's other things you can do to help make your question easy to understand:
- Proofread it! Check for spelling and grammar errors. Grammarly or ChatGPT can help if your first language is not English
- Include context! Don't just explain the problem, explain what you're trying to achieve and why.
- Add screenshots or examples! Showing is often better than telling. You can paste screenshots into your posts in the same way you would elsewhere, just remember to blur out any sensitive information if required.
Explain what you have already tried
Few things are more frustrating than being given basic troubleshooting steps that you have already carried out yourself. Be sure to let everyone know the things you have done to self-diagnose your problem in your post. Make it clear what you've tried, and what effect it has had.
Use good formatting
Our Community post editor is packed with features to help you make your post easy to read. You can:
- Make important information bold
- Add paragraphs to separate important concepts
- Use bulleted and numbered lists to explain steps in a process
- Add images, GIFs and videos
- Create tables
- ... and lots more!
Taking the time to explore the tools available in the post editor is a very easy way to make it easy for others to read and answer your question. Simply hover over any of the icons in the toolbar to see what they do:
Associate your question with a product
If your question is about a specific SS&C Blue Prism product, you should always use the "Associated Products" box to let everyone know which product and version you're using. This does 2 very important things:
- It makes sure you get advice tailored for the product and version you use!
- It makes sure your post appears on that product's page, subscriptions and feeds across the community, making it more likely that experts who can help you will see your post
To use Product Associations, just start typing the name of your product in the box and choose the relevant product when it appears:
That's it for our tips on asking great questions. Thank you for being a great community member, and making our community a fantastic place to learn.
If you have tips of your own, you can share them in the comments below!
