Thread Subject:

CSSM activity

Dear readers, dear Bruno,

The number of CSSM posts has been decreasing substantially from 10.000 in Dec-2010 to 2000 now.
Is this related to less spam and double postings?
Or have the users gone to other forums and MATLAB Answers? (I know that this cannot be answered by the users, who are not here anymore, but perhaps you have an impression...)

Why do you still use CSSM, although Answers offers more features?
This question is explicitely thought for Bruno, who looked in Answers for some weeks but left it afterwards. Do you have suggestions for improvements?

See also:
 http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/13927-the-future-of-cssm-and-answers
 http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/994-wish-list-for-matlab-answer-sections

Thanks, Jan

I post less often here because users seem to have gone to answers.
Have you added up the numbers of both forums together? Is it even
possible to get the number of Answers answers and comments that have
been posted in a given time period??? I'd bet that if you could add
those two together you'd get close to 10,000.

As I see it, both are lame forums with lots of problems. Whereas
before we had one lame forum, now we have two lame forums, which just
complicates things. For example, many users post the same question in
both forums and so you might have to, if you want to, answer them in
both places. What a pain. The biggest pain of "Answers" is the lack
of time/date stamps so you can tell where the recent activity was,
along with the totally screwed up chronological sorting (or non-
sorting) of the responses.
ImageAnalyst

Dear ImageAnalyst,

> Is it even possible to get the number of Answers answers and comments that have
> been posted in a given time period??? I'd bet that if you could add
> those two together you'd get close to 10,000.

Unfortunately I did not find a method to meausure the number of threads in CSSM (just the posts, if I understood correctly) and posts in Answers (just the tiotal number of threads is shown). More details statistics would be very interesting.

Answers is free of spam. Once a week a spam message is in the list for some hours before the admins delete it. This is a big psychological advantage: When I'm trying to concentrate on the cutest CUMSUM(ACCUMARRAY(DIFF())) tricks and an idiot disturbs me by "buy V1@gr@ chiip together with good Nike shoes", I feel a like an idiot for myself for a certain portion.

> The biggest pain of "Answers" is the lack of time/date stamps...
I agree. The stamps are available in the data base, but they are not displayed currently. I hope that the next update includes sortable answer lists and exact time stamps.

Thanks for your answer.
If the number of CSSM posts follow the current trend, the 100% spam level is reached in 2 months. It would be extremly sad, if this forum is a victim of canibalism only, but the users and contributors are not attracted by Answers. Therefore I hope, that Answers can be updated *soon* such that all CSSMers could/will enjoy it, if they like to.

Otherwise another forum will fill this gap. And as usual it will be financed by non-Matlab commercials.

Kind regards, Jan

On Aug 18, 5:28 am, "Jan Simon" <matlab.THIS_Y...@nMINUSsimon.de>
wrote:
> Unfortunately I did not find a method to meausure the number of threads in CSSM (just the posts, if I understood correctly) and posts in Answers (just the tiotal number of threads is shown). More details statistics would be very interesting.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can go to http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.matlab/about?hl=en
to get the number of separate posts per month in CSSM. For some weird
reason, you have to go there and get a partial page first, but then
when you refresh the page you'll get more information. I don't know
why, but they make you work for it.
ImageAnalyst

I participate on a number of other usenet discussion groups
All of them have seen extreme drops in traffic in recent months

The general theory is

1. Lots of people use google groups as their primary mechanism to access
usenet
2. google groups has been incredible flaky over the past few months






"Jan Simon" <matlab.THIS_YEAR@nMINUSsimon.de> wrote in message
news:j2hord$j9u$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com...
> Dear readers, dear Bruno,
>
> The number of CSSM posts has been decreasing substantially from 10.000 in
> Dec-2010 to 2000 now.
> Is this related to less spam and double postings?
> Or have the users gone to other forums and MATLAB Answers? (I know that
> this cannot be answered by the users, who are not here anymore, but
> perhaps you have an impression...)
>
> Why do you still use CSSM, although Answers offers more features?
> This question is explicitely thought for Bruno, who looked in Answers for
> some weeks but left it afterwards. Do you have suggestions for
> improvements?
>
> See also:
> http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/13927-the-future-of-cssm-and-answers
> http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/994-wish-list-for-matlab-answer-sections
>
> Thanks, Jan

On Aug 18, 9:55 am, "Richard_Willey" <rwil...@mathworks.com> wrote:
> 1.  Lots of people use google groups as their primary mechanism to access
> usenet
> 2.  google groups has been incredible flaky over the past few months
---------------------------
Yes, Google didn't post anything from this newsgroup and many others
from August 1 - August 10, and never gave any explanation for it that
I could ever find (and I looked). I think it did add them back in
once the outage was over. But Google has 2-4 outages a year, and
never explains why.

Dear Richard_Willey,

> I participate on a number of other usenet discussion groups
> All of them have seen extreme drops in traffic in recent months

This is very interesting. Then the reduced traffic effects in CSSM might have more causes then just the existence of Answers.

Thanks, Jan

"Jan Simon" wrote in message <j2hord$j9u$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com>...

> This question is explicitely thought for Bruno, who looked in Answers for some weeks but left it afterwards. Do you have suggestions for improvements?

I prefer CSSM for various reasons:
- Linear organization by posting time is easier to follow, and by a large margin.
- Do not have distracting gadgets such as comments, voting, reputation.
- I find the discussions turned out here are more computation oriented, which I prefer [ to the reputation oriented on the other ;-)].

Two things I really like in Answers editor is specific code formatting and possibility to edit his/her own post. But that's about it.

Since I do not have enough time to share in both boards, my vote goes to CSSM which - between the two - has incidentally less reputation .

Bruno

Dear Bruno,

> I do not have enough time to share in both boards, my vote goes to CSSM which - between the two - has incidentally less reputation .

Thanks for the answer.
Currently I have the impression, that Answers has the reputation to offer colors and less noise, while CSSM contains more technical and theoretical discussion pressed in the ASCII format.

The voting and reputation is double-edged. I don't think, that they are efficient methods to increase the quality. But they support the feeling to participate in a MATLAB oriented text adventure.

Kind regards, Jan

"Bruno Luong" <b.luong@fogale.findmycountry> wrote in message
news:j2l8ua$o7g$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com...
> "Jan Simon" wrote in message <j2hord$j9u$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com>...
>
>> This question is explicitely thought for Bruno, who looked in Answers for
>> some weeks but left it afterwards. Do you have suggestions for
>> improvements?
>
> I prefer CSSM for various reasons:
> - Linear organization by posting time is easier to follow, and by a large
> margin.
> - Do not have distracting gadgets such as comments, voting, reputation.
> - I find the discussions turned out here are more computation oriented,
> which I prefer [ to the reputation oriented on the other ;-)].
>
> Two things I really like in Answers editor is specific code formatting and
> possibility to edit his/her own post. But that's about it.
>
> Since I do not have enough time to share in both boards, my vote goes to
> CSSM which - between the two - has incidentally less reputation .

When you use the word "reputation" in the last line of your reply, do you
intend it to have the same meaning as your usage of "reputation" in your
second bullet? I _think_ the answer is no, but I'd appreciate a
clarification.

--
Steve Lord
slord@mathworks.com
To contact Technical Support use the Contact Us link on
http://www.mathworks.com

"Steven_Lord" <slord@mathworks.com> wrote in message
>
> When you use the word "reputation" in the last line of your reply, do you
> intend it to have the same meaning as your usage of "reputation" in your
> second bullet? I _think_ the answer is no, but I'd appreciate a
> clarification.
>

I confirm is the two words "reputation" has different meaning. The last line is just a sarcastic spontaneous reply from me.

Bruno

On Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:28:08 +0000, Jan Simon set fingers to keyboard and
typed:

> Answers is free of spam. Once a week a spam message is in the list for
> some hours before the admins delete it. This is a big psychological
> advantage: When I'm trying to concentrate on the cutest
> CUMSUM(ACCUMARRAY(DIFF())) tricks and an idiot disturbs me by "buy
> V1@gr@ chiip together with good Nike shoes", I feel a like an idiot for
> myself for a certain portion.

cssm is free of spam as well *if* one uses an nntp host that filters spam
I use individual.net, 10 euro/year, and see *no* spam in cssm.
Eternalseptember is free but does let a very small quantity of spam thru.

>> The biggest pain of "Answers" is the lack of time/date stamps...
> I agree. The stamps are available in the data base, but they are not
> displayed currently. I hope that the next update includes sortable
> answer lists and exact time stamps.

I've never used "answers" (didn't know it existed) but it sounds like it's
web based. I have yet to find a web based application that can handle the
volume that cssm handles in a manor that works for me.

$0.02 from a casual matlab user...

Bruce