Hello Community. So this week, users started getting a 403 error when attempting to “Ask the Expert.” Only superadmins would not get the error. I wracked my brain trying to troubleshoot this as it was working previously with no obvious changes to anything. I ended up in with a support ticket.
The “solution” was very surprising to me and I want to share in an effort to save others some time and effort. Surely I can’t be the only one who’s experienced this. The solution as per support was to enable the setting “Users must select a channel when asking questions” in Discover, Coach and Share Settings. (We were not previously requiring the user to select a channel to assign the question to because our Q&A is set up to seem more like a discussion forum and we didn’t want to force user to pick a channel.) So now we are forced to require the user to assign a channel. So I set up a “General Discuss and Share” channel, put it at the top of the channel list so the user doesn’t have to think too hard to get the question or comment in a channel.
The bottom line here is that a change was made a few weeks ago in preparation for a new feature coming later this year that will allow Q&A content to be filtered and shown in the appropriate channel. IMHO not a very elegant or well documented change that had a big impact on us but I digress. We are excited about the upcoming changes and will benefit from improved functionality with Q&A and channels and it’s just as well that we start having users assign their Q&A to a channel but it’s been a bit of a headache for us this week. Hope I can save some other administrators the same hassle.
P.S. If you are interested in how we set up our social “Discuss & Share” in our platform, check out my post at
