Thread Subject: Quoting has arrived at MATLAB Central!

Great news!!!

If you have replied to a message on the MATLAB Central's new Newsreader, you probably noticed that message quoting has been implementented. Now, when you reply to a message, the reply entry box that you type in has the original message text. Text is preceeded by > so that it is distinguishable from your message text. (A suggestion in using quoting, to facilitate reader comprehension, I do suggest that you trim out long message text that is not being referenced. If you include just the parts you are refering to, the message will be much easier to read.)

On a different note, if you are using the "Flag message as spam", we have removed the acknowledgement message. Instead, you will be returned to the original message. Note that this flag is applied to the message. If the message is the original message in a thread, on receiving 5 user flags, the entire thread is removed.

We have also made some changes to our newserver to try to address the issue of missing threads. We are monitoring traffic to see if the situation has been improved.

Your feedback is much appreciated. As you can see from these changes, your comments help us to improve our community space. We are working on prioritizing other feedback. Please do let us know if you have other ideas.

Best wishes,
Helen Chen

"Helen Chen" <helen.chen@mathworks.com> wrote in message <f7of2r$c2u$1@fred.mathworks.com>...

> Your feedback is much appreciated. As you can see from these changes, your comments help us to improve our community space. We are working on prioritizing other feedback. Please do let us know if you have other ideas.

Ok, that's a step in the right direction. I want to see what this looks like with a real newsreader and then I will reply with additional thoughts.

--
Doug Schwarz
dmschwarz&ieee,org
Make obvious changes to get email address.
(This sig added manually)

> Your feedback is much appreciated. As you can see from these changes, your comments help us to improve our community space. We are working on prioritizing other feedback. Please do let us know if you have other ideas.

Thumbs up for the changes. It's a refreshing change to see this relatively short development-cycle time. I hope it signals a change across the MathWorks platforms/products, not just in the newsreader.

Here's an idea which I did not see posted earlier (apologies if I missed anyone): enable automatic message signatures, just like any modern mail client or newsreader. Since posters now have a profile, this would be an intuitive place to define such a signature (default = user's name).

Yair Altman

"Douglas Schwarz" <see@sig.for.address.edu> wrote in message <f7ojcn$jc2$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> "Helen Chen" <helen.chen@mathworks.com> wrote in message <f7of2r$c2u$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
>
> > Your feedback is much appreciated. As you can see from these changes, your comments help us to improve our community space. We are working on prioritizing other feedback. Please do let us know if you have other ideas.
>
> Ok, that's a step in the right direction. I want to see what this looks like with a real newsreader and then I will reply with additional thoughts.


I was hoping to see what this looked like in a real newsreader and then reply to that, but since this thread never appeared on my news server I can't do that. So that's comment number 1:

1. Fix the propagation of messages to the rest of the world. This is, by far, the most important problem. Since most people seem to use the TMW interface to CSSM you have an obligation to keep things running smoothly.

2. Messages should be broken into lines with hard end-of-line characters. Make the lines 72 characters so that even if that text is quoted a few times by a newsreader that doesn't re-wrap it will still be less than 80 characters.

3. Quoting looks fine ('> ' prepended to each line).

4. A nice enhancement to quoting would be to re-wrap a quoted section if the lines exceed 80 characters. Also, don't wrap a properly formed URL (e.g., <http://www.mathworks.com>).

5. If you implement signatures please do it right. A signature should be preceded by a line containing only '-- ' (that's dash-dash-space). Some newsreaders automatically detect such a signature and don't include it when quoting.

6. Automatically detect signatures when quoting and don't include them.


That's all I can think of right now. Thanks for listening!

--
Doug Schwarz
dmschwarz&ieee,org
Make obvious changes to get real email address.

"Yair Altman" <altmanyDEL@gmailDEL.comDEL> wrote in message
> Thumbs up for the changes. It's a refreshing change to see this relatively short development-cycle time. I hope it signals a change across the MathWorks platforms/products, not just in the newsreader.
>
Thanks! :-)

> Here's an idea which I did not see posted earlier (apologies if I missed anyone): enable automatic message signatures, just like any modern mail client or newsreader. Since posters now have a profile, this would be an intuitive place to define such a signature (default = user's name).
>
This is on our list of requested enhancements. Thanks!

Helen

"Douglas Schwarz" <see@sig.for.address.edu> wrote in message <f7qeci$j6j$1@fred.mathworks.com>...

> That's all I can think of right now. Thanks for listening!
>
Thanks for all the feedback!

The propagation list is definately high on our list of concerns and we continue work in this area.
 
As I mentioned to Yair, we have signatures on the list of suggested enhancements. I do appreciate your additional implementation details. :-)

Best wishes,
Helen

A "Flag as spam" button on the post list page would be a great addition. That would let everyone quickly get rid of those recurring spam message without forcing us to actually look at the post.

"Jeremy Smith" <smit1729@umn.NOSPAM.edu> wrote in message <f7qpg9$ebv$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> A "Flag as spam" button on the post list page would be a great addition. That would let everyone quickly get rid of those recurring spam message without forcing us to actually look at the post.


We have added this to the list of requested enhancements.

Thanks for the feedback!
Helen