New Feature Added: Share Tool

[JesseCloutier]

As of December 14^th, 2023, Esri Community will be updated to include a new post sharing feature. This addition makes it possible for Esri staff and Esri Community MVPs to expand the visibility of posts by duplicating them across Esri Community Boards in just a few clicks.

When a post is shared this way, all copies of it remain connected so that comments, threaded replies, and Accepted Solutions added to any of those copies will sync across the others so that users can build on the same conversation from multiple locations. Note that syncing for Accepted Solutions and certain other data occurs on a 24-hour cycle.

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For detailed documentation, see How to use the Share Tool.

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Using this feature, Question, Blog, and Documents posts may be shared to any number of like-kind Boards (Question to Question, Blog to Blog, Document to Document). Because the share tool is intended to increase visibility of posts across relevant locations, members should always exercise good judgement to ensure posts are only shared to Boards for which they are a good match.  

Though only select member roles will have permissions to share posts, all Esri Community members can view and interact with shared posts.

Members will know a post is shared by several identifying elements:

Source Post

A source post (the original post from which copies are shared) will display a blue icon to the left of the post’s subject line. This appears as a laptop with an arrow pointing upward into a cloud.

 Post preview for a source post located in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

Target Post

Target posts (copies of the source post) will also display a blue icon to the left of the posts’ subject lines. This appears as a laptop with an arrow pointing downward into a laptop. Additionally, the post’s username will appear as ShareUser, which also has the green “Esri” pill beside it regardless of the original post author’s role. A line above the post body will detail the location the post was shared from as well as the post author’s username.

 An open target post with details related to its share status

Shared Comments

Similarly, members who comment on a source or target post will see that their comment appears as being from ShareUser (which has the green ‘Esri’ pill beside it) when synced to other copies. The location of the original comment and comment author’s name will be listed above the comment body.

 A comment as it appears once synced into a different copy of the post it was published in

Note that Kudos, tags, and labels are unique to each location they’re added and do not sync across all copies of shared posts.

Questions? See our Help Documentation for more details about the Share tool’s capabilities and limitations, or ask us in a comment below.

[LindsayRaabe_FPCWA]

Just tried to look at the "How to" via the link you provided but getting a page error or access permissions error. Was trying to see what roles will be able to use this functionality. 

[JesseCloutier]

Sorry about that, @LindsayRaabe_FPCWA! I've just done some work with that link and it should be behaving now. Please go ahead and give it another try when you have a moment. As for your question: Esri staff and Esri Community MVPs are the two roles that have the permissions required to share posts using this tool.  

[KenBuja]

Is there a way that a post won't show in the Latest Activity feed for each group it's been shared with? For example, this post shows up 18 other times. There's been a few times where other posts get lost in the blizzard of share notifications.

 

[JesseCloutier]

Thanks for bringing up this example, @KenBuja. As of right now, the expected behavior is that it when a post is shared to other Boards it will trigger one notification per Board a member is subscribed to. We don't currently have a method for having our system recognize when someone is receiving duplicate notifications (one per subscribed Board) and then filter those out to just show one. It's something I'm noting, though, as we track user feedback on this feature.

In the case above, are you subscribed to the each of the Boards you received a notification for? I want to make sure there isn't an unexpected behavior occurring that needs investigation.

[KenBuja]

@JesseCloutierI am not subscribed to any of these boards. These are all appearing in the Latest Activity list

 

[JesseCloutier]

@KenBuja Which Latest Activity feed are you referring to? If this screenshot is from the Home Page of Esri Community, then that would be normal behavior: We expect a post preview to show up once for each copy of a post that's shared and it would make sense that a cluster of them would appear at the same time since in most cases each copy is being published simultaneously. They should filter out at at the pace other new posts are added and replace older post previews with fresh ones.

What shouldn't be happening is for each of those other individual Boards to show more than one shared post preview in their own Latest Activity feeds and you shouldn't receive notifications (via the bell icon in the top navigation) or via email for shared posts on boards you aren't subscribed to. 

Does that make sense? Please let me know if I've misunderstood what you're seeing and suspect something is amiss.

[KenBuja]

It's the home page. This particular post was an egregious sample, with so many shares. This is where some different logic should be used to display shared posts. Instead of having one post preview for each board that post is shared with, a single preview would have multiple locations listed, like 

in ArcGIS Parcel Fabric Blog, ArcGIS Mapping and Charting Blog, ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud Blog, etc.

One of the drawbacks of sharing a post in multiple boards is that any comments made to a post in one board would not show up in another board.

[JesseCloutier]

Thanks for confirming that this example is from the Home Page, @KenBuja. Though this is working as expected, your point is understandable and we're happy to keep it in mind as a potential enhancement request for the future. To your note about how comments behave—you'll be glad to know that when a comment is posted in any shared post (or the original they're shared from), that comment will sync across them all. Similarly, if a shared or original Question is marked as having an Accepted Solution, that syncs across all connected posts as well. What won't sync and stays individual to each post are kudos, tags, and labels.