Since the launch of Q&A earlier this week, the flow of ideas and suggestions how to improve GrabCAD has been one big positive surprise. Great to see you all speaking up and hence one quick update of the recent happenings is overdue. Here're the recent changes.
Profile percentage and ranking
The first important update is related to the profile percentage. Until yesterday we had left the last 10% open, just to leave room for new features to be included in the percentage calculation. The good news a lot of you have been waiting for - you now have a chance to get your profile to 100%.
If you've had all your profile fields filled out, yet still lacking the last 10, all you have to do now is to get at least three badges (they can be anything) and boom - you'll hit the 100! (And to be engineer-precise: it't 10% for three, not 3,33% for one ;))
The reasoning behind such a change is that badges quickly give a good overview of how active you have been and how you have influenced or helped the GrabCAD community the most.
We are leaving ourselves the freedom to update the profile percentage every now and then when any influential features will be launched. But we will keep you all posted about such changes when they happen.
The number next to your ranking is another tiny new feature. It should show you how much you've climbed or fallen compared to yesterday. We are improving how the number is displayed in the coming days just a tiny bit - again to make it better to understand.
Q&A: adding tutorials
The Q&A has taken off really well, thank you for all the great feedback!
Some small tips how to use it so that it would become a valuable information source for everyone:
If you know an answer to any CAD software specific function or command question and where a tutorial with screenshots and comments would be the easiest to explain, there is a link to create an answer with a tutorial.
The answers with tutorials are typically shown as the top answers on the question page because they generally are the most useful.
We added a block of 'Latest tutorials' to the right hand side column of the Q&A page as well. This lists the questions where tutorials have been added recently. Could be and interesting reading for many of you.
Q&A: voting and commenting
When you see a question, there are three options how to react and reply:
- comment the question: this is useful if the original question needs clarification, something is missing and you want the asker to specify something.
- answer: if you know the answer, it is well appreciated if you share your knowledge and help others out. With or without tutorial, depends on the question.
- comment the answer: in case someone has already answered and you have an opinion about the same solution, keeping the replies grouped and leaving comment threads to specific answers simply helps everyone to grasp who is discussing what.
- vote for or against an answer: if any suggested solution worked for you, do click 'It worked', in the opposite case click 'Not helpful'. The answers that have the most 'It worked' votes always climb up. Again, this is good to let the engineer to get to the most useful and relevant answers more quickly. It's also a way to appreciate the answerer's effort and give feedback that this answer has actually solved the problem in the question.
Improving GrabCAD
There are so many ideas and suggestions coming up in the comments and answers and questions as well. Until we have one special section for GrabCAD feature requests on the Q&A page, our kind recommendation is to post all your ideas and suggestions and issues under Improving GrabCAD. It helps all our staff at GrabCAD a ton if all the discussion is together - easier for us to reply and comment and take notes for development about which wishes are the most popular and what issues you report the most.
Other than that - a great weekend to you all and keep up the good work! Improving GrabCAD is an absolute blast day in and day out when there are so many amazing things shared and happening over here.
