The future of CSSM and Answers
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CSSM is a valuable newsgroup.
Unfortunately it is not possible to embed graphics in CSSM posts, but the noise is a bigger problem:
- Without the possibility to edit existing posts, a correction or improvement needs a new post and leaves junk.
- Spam.
- Double posts caused by the latency after sending a message through the TMW pages.
- Rererepeated questions concerning EVAL and the floating point issues.
The number of posts in CSSM has been growing from 1993 to 2010 a kind of exponential with a bump from 2004 to 2006. Then MATLAB Answers started at the beginning of 2011 (red line), and at the same time the number of CSSM posts broke down:
I have the impression, that Answers is very near to be CSSM 2.0. Currently the communication follows the fixed question<->answer schema usually, but there have been some votings ( Vote if you want functions in scrips / don't want / don't care ), tutorials about this forum, games and wish lists. These meta-posts, which are actually no questions in the sense of a FAQ, got the highest number of votes.
In consequence I think, that there is an important demand for more general discussions in this forum. How can the interface be improved to fullfill this need? Should Answers grow up to Discussions?
We had a lot of very good ideas in the wish-list for MATLAB Answers - this is the thread with the most answers. The TMW team seems to follow the old and wise strategy not to implement new features hastily. While this is method is very efficient to create stable and reliable MATLAB releases, I'd be glad to see faster advances in this forum.
7 Comments
Accepted Answer
Oleg Komarov
on 18 Aug 2011
Quoting Jan:
"In consequence I think, that there is an important demand for more general discussions in this forum. How can the interface be improved to fullfill this need? Should Answers grow up to Discussions?"
If I recall correctly TMW gives weight to our opinions and I take the opportunity to renew my suggestion to vote on Wish-list for MATLAB Answer sections if you think that a tutorial section could be useful.
Obviously the idea has gotten wider and I would be happy to vote Jan's proposal on the wish list.
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More Answers (6)
Walter Roberson
on 20 Aug 2011
MATLAB Answers is still in the stage of "We'll make it available and see what evolves out of it". If we want it to be more "Discussions", then we can make it more Discussions. All we have to do is start, and to let it be known that we have changed the scope of what is supported here.
That said:
- This is still a feature of TMW, and TMW is (I would suppose) not likely to be interested in spending much employee time on matters not related to their business.
- Thus pure theory discussions that do not tend (overall) to increase the use of TWM products should, at the very least, be largely self-running by community volunteers.
- Theory discussions that tend to suggest that a competitor's product would be more appropriate would, I imagine, be broadly acceptable to TMW only to the extent that TMW is not really competing in that area and has no real interest in competing in that area. For example, it seems unlikely to me that TMW would decide to go head-to-head on performance versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search
- Good theory people who are patient with newcomers, able to write well, do not "talk down" to people having difficulty with concepts, and whom do not get involved in theory flame-wars, are unfortunately not in high supply. It may be difficult to get a "critical mass"
- Even patient theory people are prone to "triage" topics. If in (say) 4 hours, someone can give good hints to (say) 3 people who show evidence of being able to "take the ball and run it down the field", then that theorist is more likely to do that than to risk spending the 4 hours explaining (say) how to form a matrix determinant to someone whose response might be, "Read my posting again, stupid. I didn't ask for a lecture. If you aren't competent to provide the finished code, then just shut up."
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Fangjun Jiang
on 18 Aug 2011
I wouldn't call "slow" old and wise. I wouldn't think it is that hard to implement some of the high demanding wish lists, such as better search engine, mark a question for my own interest, edit comments, etc. The order of "My Answers" is still not fixed. The response from the MATLAB Central team has been disappointing.
7 Comments
Sean de Wolski
on 18 Aug 2011
like why our answers used to be in chronological order (so we know it once worked) but no longer are?
Sean de Wolski
on 18 Aug 2011
I do miss some of the long theory (not all of it necessarily related to ML) discussions on CSSM (Walter helps here) and I feel like I learned more from it, though Answers wasn't around for my exponential ML learning curve.
This forum is just so much easier to use (I'd get so aggravated waiting 25 minutes for a post to appear across CSSM; or if you made a typo, waiting 25 minutes, replying to fix the typo, waiting 25 more minutes). We can still have discussions here through comments and post updating, it just doesn't happen very often.
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I'm also curious what the Answerer demographic will look like in a year here. I just finished my MS degree and will likely be done with MATLAB when my license expires, (unless I can convince/justify to my future employer that it's worthwhile). Others are certainly in the same boat as me and others have slowed down/quit entirely.
Maybe we should begin an obituary thread for retired Answerers?
4 Comments
John D'Errico
on 19 Aug 2011
I hope to un-retire one day, but until then, I'll stick to writing an occasional new FEX contribution.
Walter Roberson
on 18 Aug 2011
I stopped posting in CSSM. That accounted for a third of the posts right there ;-)
8 Comments
Jan
on 12 Dec 2011
5 Comments
Walter Roberson
on 13 Dec 2011
Developer participation is problematic because of Mathwork's fairly tight policy of not talking about plans or work in progress, or (to a lesser extent) about software internals. "Yes, we know why this is happening, but we cannot tell you why and we cannot give you any idea of when it will be fixed."
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