A feature in Make to make asking questions on community.make.com easier

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One of the things that makes getting support in community difficult is the ability to explain the problem in a way that enables everyone to help. I have found the following issues with questions to be a stumbling block in providing good help:

  1. Generic open-ended questions, that potentially have many answers or none at all
  2. Explaining the problem without much details
  3. Providing assets as part of the question to help someone to recreate the problem/issue and find a work around.

There are many assets in Make that can be provided, but in order to do so the person asking the question has to take quite a bit of time to create those assets and as a result many people avoid this. Wouldn’t it be cool if Make had a button or feature to create a bundle of assets that can be added to a community question automatically?

This could include

  1. a graphical snapshot of the scenario or just a section of the scenario
  2. A blueprint of the scenario in JSON format
  3. The JSON of the input and output bundles of a specific module
  4. The filter definition of a specific filter

Optional: After execution of the scenario the input and output bundles in JSON of every module

I’m just sitting here reading @samliew excellent answers and I think maybe 50-80% of time his answers include a boilerplate “please provide ALL this stuff”. It would be better if Make made it easier to ask questions on community. I bet this would make it better for Make support as well if this sort of information was included in the emails they receive.

What do you think?

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I’ve even been suspected of being a bot :joy:

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While most of it are boilerplate templates - see link above, I do try to customise the replies and include suggestions or background info as well.

The truth is, if a new user posts their overly broad or vague question here, and nobody replies (even if just to tell them how to provide additional information), then they may feel frustrated about the platform and find alternatives which could also mean a competitor. So the least we could all do is to welcome them to the forum and let them know we can help, but their question needs to be clarified first.

New users also means they are still likely on the Free plan, so they wouldn’t be getting much help from support either. Hence the links to the help center, academy, and relevant tutorials.

If we want to see this community grow, then we need all the help to get the users to ask better questions, so that they can get answers quickly.

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And thus the request to design a feature right inside Make to make it easier for newbie and professional/experienced users and partners to create a bundle of assets that can make it easier to communicate here.

It is most definitely not easy to answer questions when one is lacking so much information and asking a question related to Make to me could be perceived as harder than asking a question related to a typical code question on Stackoverflow.

Most Make newbies are also not technical and are not used to providing a detailed set of background context/scenario assets so a feature that makes it easier to create ready made solutions could be useful. A few more simpler UI improvement examples:

  1. Make it much more obvious how input and output bundles can be selected and copied and pasted. Right now it is hidden in the operation bundle and honestly that UI is extremely well hidden, as if Make doesn’t really want you to know this is what is happening. The outbut and input bundles should be accessible right from the same place you can preview the actual bundles and there should be a way to download/copy to clipboard right there.

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  1. After selecting one or more modules using shift-select (also non obvious you can do this) popup a few options in the UI

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  1. Another helper:

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ps. Your frequent replies are the single thing keeping the community useful right now for most questions. I used to be like you when the community started but the sheer demands of answering 40-50 questions per day got a bit too much so now I am quite a bit more specific with what I try to answer. It’s a full time job, so honestly when do you sleep :sleeping: ?

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