Audiences allow you to group users together making it easier to assign courses, programs, certifications, learning plans, appraisals and many more objects to multiple learners profiles all at once. The use of rulesets once created will continuously run to check for users who meet the criteria and add them to your audience.
However should the need arise to edit an active audience there is always a risk you accidentally add or remove a user from the audience you didn't intent to. Our recommendation when making any edits to an active audience is to create a copy of the audience to test with.
To create a copy of an audience you plan to edit, hover over the middle icon on the 'Actions' column as shown below and follow the on screen prompts.
When the new audience is created the system will automatically give it the same name but adding an additional "Copy of" to the beginning of the title so it is easily identified. Note the new test audience will only contain users and the rulesets and will not copy over any existing attributes. This will ensure you do not accidently enroll users or trigger unwanted emails.
Best Practice when adding rulesets
Number of rulesets
When it comes to adding rulesets to an audience is it best to avoid adding to many. There is no set number of how many rulesets you should add as it will depend on what you are trying to achieve. However it is important to note complex rulesets over time may introduce problems. For example if a ruleset depends on the completion of multiple courses, programs, or even certifications for a large number of users then over time those number will increase. The impact of this means it could take long to process and the periods between cron cycles will take longer and may cause performance issues. If you would like the team to review a ruleset you can reach out to our support team for guidance.
Exclude your inactive users
Another recommendations to consider is do you need to include inactive users, that is users who are deleted or marked as suspended.
The use of hierarchy paths in rulesets
Useful to note that the configuration around four key pieces of Hierarchy information held on a learners profile as shown below can take up to 24 hours to update when used within a ruleset.