Tridion StackExchange Forum Automation

March 4th, 2014 | Posted by Robert Curlette in Lifehacking | Tridion

Today the best and quickest way to get an answer to your Tridion question is at the Tridion StackExchange site. StackOverflow was created in 2008 and shortly after in 2009 they opened up the platform for other topics to have their own Q&A site.

In 2009 the only place for having Tridion questions answered was the password-protected Tridion forum. Created in 2001 the forum was a great place for asking and answering questions in the small but active Tridion community. However, over time it got a little slow and more difficult to find answers to questions. It was also only open to those who had a login from Tridion Customer Support.

Realizing the potential of StackExchange to help power the active Tridion community, Dave Houlker proposed the Tridion StackExchange forum in 2011 and info about it can be found here.  As of March, 2014 it boasts the following statistics:

  • 643 visits a day
  • 4.6 questions a day
  • 98% answered
  • 834 total users, 153 avid users

It’s possible to configure StackOverflow to send us an email when a new question arrives.  Some people keep the Tridion StackExchange site open in a tab (and the # of new questions shows immediately), however, I prefer to use the email method.  Over the Christmas holidays I disabled all my auto-emailing scripts and until now have not had it enabled.  I noticed I visited the site a lot less, and also answered a lot less questions.  Enabling the email trigger is not so straight forward and here I want to describe how to set it.

  1. Select edit, Advanced from the Favorite Tag menu
  2. Configure the tag subscription

I have the website send me an email 15 minutes with the new questions and this helps me to answer faster and also keep up to speed on topics related to Tridion.

I am a big fan of automation and the email filter was the best way to stay on top of the forum and also answer more questions (= more points).  However, recently it got disabled and as a result I stopped visiting so frequently and also my points started to lag.

I hope you enjoy this tip.  I also like to automate the opening of my timesheet (and other routine tasks) and previously wrote an article about automating Firefox to open at the same time every day to my timesheet site.

Good luck with automating these tasks to make them painless.

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