Knowledge Center: Updates for October 2016

Here are a list of updates for the Knowledge Centre for October 2016. Yes, I realize it's not October yet, but it seems wrong to have "Updates for September" when it's the last day of the month.

Anyway, here we are:

FME Knowledge Centre: October 2016 ("We DO Need Those Stinkin' Badges")

• Custom Badges: The big one that I've been waiting for. More info below...

• The Refine Search dialog now includes the ability to filter articles by article type; for example all "Known Issue" articles. It was a little, er buggy, but it is now stable in appearance and functionality.

• The search tools have been given a general overhaul. I think the biggest change is from an "OR" search to an "AND". For example, FME Objects used to return 60+ articles, anything containing the word FME or the word Objects. Now it returns only the 5 articles that contain FME and Objects.

• We've upgraded to AnswerHub 1.6.5. Their release notes are here. Apparently there are "dozens of customer requested features". I bet a lot of them were from us! We're very demanding when it comes to getting the best for our users!

• You might have noticed a few questions getting posted recently by the FME Lizard. These are questions that were asked through the support team or livechat and that we think you will find interesting. Maybe you'll even come up with a better answer than we did!

Custom Badges

Custom Badges means that we can create our own Knowledge Centre badges and assign them to you for... well, for almost anything we want.

The idea is that you might not be the top of the Reputation leader board, but you can still achieve something special - something that those folk might never be awarded!

For example, 9 users just received the Pirate Chief badge for asking a question on Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th).

Congratulations to @ejmpost, @parnelandr, @anne_shanahan, @aleho, @geodavid76, @lifalin2016, and @raghunaren - not to mention a couple of Safe staff who snuck a question in on that day.

There will be other badges for asking or answering questions on a specific day of the year; but we won't reveal which days in advance, so keep an eye out for those!

You might also notice there is a slightly more serious badge for answering a question tagged with Parallel Processing. Coincidentally (and it was a coincidence) there was a question posted today tagged with that very topic. So have at it.

We have a whole bunch of other badges lined up - some serious, some not so serious - and please feel free to suggest some below (or in the ideas section).

At the moment all badges are awarded manually - so I will be keeping watch on that parallel processing question - which is a bit limiting. But I hope we'll be able to automate them in the future so they can be awarded on a larger scale (for example, maybe a badge for attending the FME International User Conference?)

OK, sing after me:

F-M-E