Wish-list for MATLAB Answer sections.

This topic (which was not started by Mathworks) is for features you would like to see for this MATLAB Answers facility.

I suggest one wish per answer, so that people can vote for individual wishes.

[Andrew Newell]

Coming soon: the book.

[Jan]

Coming later: the implementation.

[Daniel Shub]

Now that so many of the wishes have been implemented (thank you to TMW), should we deleted the implemented answers to make it easier to find the outstanding issues? Should we refer to the current version of answers as 2.0 and start a new wish-list for it?

[Sean de Wolski]

I like Daniel's Idea about leaving this alone and starting a wish-list 2.0. I can't even load this whole page without IE8 dumping. Thus any new wishes from today I can't see. Here's my first:

-Once you hit a reputation of say 20, get rid of the "how to post an answer" comments that take up space.

[Walter Roberson]

I have been thinking myself that we should start a volume 2. I would not delete anything here, though.

Ideally some of what is here should be moved to the new list. I did not want to just go ahead and create the new Answers, though, as that would not give proper credit to the people who originally proposed them.

[Walter Roberson]

New list has been created! http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/42413-wish-list-2-and-bug-reports-for-matlab-answers-itself

Answer 1

[Andrew Newell]

It should be possible to mark up Comments.

[Oleg Komarov]

And edit them!!!!

[Walter Roberson]

Darn, I can't vote twice for this!

[Andrew Newell]

I feel your pain.

[Harry MacDowel]

YEAH DAMN RIGHT!

[Richard Brown]

Can we please have some kind of basic math markup too?

[Image Analyst]

Wow, just realized they've gone more than a year without delivering this (what I think is) simple and heavily voted on improvement. I wonder what the delay is. have they decided against it for some reason? Or it's simply to hard for their programmers to do? Or it's a really low priority despite its high number of votes?

[Oleg Komarov]

They added a dashed line which visually separates the comments...I hope it's a preparation step for implementing the above.

[Randy Souza]

We implemented this in a release on June 27, 2012 (I'm using it right now!).

Here's a blog post describing the major changes.

[Walter Roberson]

Oh frabjous day!!

[Walter Roberson]

Already I'm editing comments regularly. It's a very welcome upgrade!

Answer 2

[Royi Avital]

M Language Syntax Highlighting.

[Amro]

I've created a userscript that applies MATLAB syntax highlighting using google-code-prettify (it was originally intended for Stack Overflow). Project is hosted on GitHub.

Install userscript directly from the following link: prettify-mathworks-answers.user.js

Answer 3

[vish]

Notification when someone replies on a previously commented question or published.

[Walter Roberson]

Is this the same as Andrew Newell's suggestion about Feeds?

[vish]

yeah i guess.

[Matt Tearle]

or email notification (the option to select it, at least -- I realize many people wouldn't want that by default)

[Lindsay Coutinho]

We have implemented a notification system for new answers to questions. Thank you for all the feedback, it helps us to prioritize what features the engineering team works on.

[Andrew Newell]

How do we use it?

[Bob Li]

Please, notification for comments on answers. Desperately need it.

Bob

Answer 4

[Walter Roberson]

• In the list of questions, each question should have a "last updated" date and time, where an update is the addition of an answer or a comment or the editing of any part of it.

One can get the list sorted by most recent update time, but without a time stamp, one has to look at the individual questions all through to determine whether there has been an update since the last time one looked at it.

[Andrew Newell]

That would save a lot of time!

[Andy]

It would also be useful to list the user name for the most recent update.

[Image Analyst]

Looks like this finally got done in October 2011. Yay!

[Walter Roberson]

And improved in today's update!

Answer 5

[Walter Roberson]

• "Next" and "Previous" buttons while reading questions, to move to the next or previous question without having to go back to the list of questions.

[sheen]

its really nice suggestion

Answer 6

[Matt Tearle]

Include questions you've commented on (but not necessarily "answered") in "my answers". This way you can keep an eye on a question where you're asking for clarification or suchlike discussion.

Note: this would be rendered less important if we had notifications of some kind.

[Matt Tearle]

and/or a watch list

[Ashish Uthama]

Matt - you could add an rss feed with a search for your user name.

[Andrew Newell]

How?

[Ashish Uthama]

Search for your user name, and look for the 'Subscribe to this View' link (below the search text box, on the right).

[Andrew Newell]

I just noticed this answer. If I search for my user name, I get 12 hits.

[Walter Roberson]

According to the help documentation, you can currently search using commented_by: tag

Answer 7

[Jan]

Perhaps this is implemented already - I didn't ask a question yet: If you select an answer as accepted, can you change the selection afterwards, if a better answer is given?

[Helen Chen]

Not at this time. It is on the list of enhancements.

[Matt Tearle]

Yes please. And/or the ability to unaccept. Recently I've seen a bunch of questions where there has been long discussion after an answer was accepted. To me, "accepted" = "case closed", so I tend to ignore those, even though some are apparently not closed.

[Walter Roberson]

yup, like The Never Ending Stepper Motor Story.

[Matt Fig]

I was going to nominate that one for the longest living dead question so far...

[Walter Roberson]

The Night Of The Living Dead Question!

("Brains. We want Brains!")

[Matt Tearle]

Wow. I hadn't seen that one. That's...

Yeah.

Pity I can't vote twice.

Answer 8

[Kent Cabarle]

Posting a photo in a thread..

[Andrew Newell]

Do you mean a Matlab plot?

[Kent Cabarle]

Yep. Anything related to the post, which may find useful for easier understanding and visualization.

[Oleg Komarov]

You can do that with double passage, first by uploading a photo on say tinypic and then using the markup <<>>

[Jan]

And if tinypic stops its service, the corresponding question or answer becomes meaningless. Would it be possible to host the pictures on a TMW server?

Answer 9

[Matt Tearle]

An automated email: "Dear [user], than you for using MATLAB Answers. Your question "[title]" now has [num_ans] answers. If any of these responses has helped you, please accept and/or up-vote them. If none of these answers has resolved your question, please provide further input to help guide others on how they can assist you"

This email should be sent after n days inactivity, at an exponentially increasing frequency;)

[Jan]

There are some questions, which cannot have an accepted answer, as e.g. this Wish-list. Any idea for this?

[Matt Tearle]

True enough. Maybe you should be able to ask "discussion questions" or something like that -- ie questions that you know, a priori, won't have a single right answer.

But then maybe that infringes on CSSM...?

Still, I'm getting fairly frustrated by the number of answers I've given where there's been deafening silence in reply -- did you solve the problem? did you give up? did what i say help/not make sense? what????

[Jan]

@Walter: Do not be frustrated. Although some doit4me and doesntcare people do not vote or accept your answer, the other readers register your effort. Besides the official reputation number here, there is a personal estimation of the quality of your work inside the other studious users. What are 900 points compared to: "Walter Roberson? I know him, his answers are trustworthy and he offers a lot of help." I appreciate, that you check the answers of others to improve the total quality of this service - you do not get points for this, but a good karma.

[Matt Tearle]

Yeah, I've seen that, Walter. I feel for you (and others... Jan, Matt Fig, Paolo, etc -- the usual suspects) when that happens. I also love it when someone jumps the gun on accepting the answer, then comes back with 15 follow-up questions because they couldn't actually make it work after all. (And then whoever does actually solve the problem gets no credit.)

But, like Jan, I try to keep philosophical. As long as I'm actually helping someone who genuinely wanted help, that's the important thing. (Like I'm ever going to catch you on reputation anyway...)

[Jan]

@Walter: Not a toolbox license, but I'm sure if *you* ask an author to expand a FEX submission such, that it fits some of your individual needs, this will be consiered with a high priority. So feel free to ask.

I really hope, that your enthusiastic power will not lead to a burn-out syndrom. Last week I've seen an emotional implosion of an esteemed CSSMer, only because somebody speculated about evil EVAL methods.

[Andrew Newell]

To put this in perspective - I once read an advice column in which a handy man was grousing that, on about four occasions, his friends had asked him for advice about home projects and then hired someone else to do the work. The reply was that it was typical for contractors to get about one job for every five or so visits. That happens to be about the ratio of acceptances to answers for most of us - and there's no money at stake.

[Matt Tearle]

That's why we care so much: because the stakes are so low!

[Walter Roberson]

@Matt: LOL

I have heard it said that in situations where large-scale distinctions between people are relatively rare, that people tend to become preoccupied with small-scale status symbols, such as parking privileges or office size.

[Matt Tearle]

Hah. Makes sense. I ripped off that line from somewhere -- it was describing university politics... I can completely see how the stuff I observed at universities was an affluent society's update to our primal urges to have our political enemies ax-murdered by corrupt government goons (after which you take their mud hut, beads, and lion skin loincloths).

Answer 10

[Matt Fig]

Answer folding.

Say there is a question which has 55 some-odd answers. I keep coming back to look and see if there is anything new, but since the answers move up and down with votes and other mechanisms, it soon gets exhausting. If I had the ability to fold answers I have read before - a choice that would stick between logins - then this process would be much easier.

I would like to be able to fold and unfold answers within a question. Perhaps a little star would appear next to the unfold button if there were new comments since I folded the question.

[Jan]

A very important improvement! It is nearly impossible to find the new answer or comment in a set of 55 answers and 100 comments. It seems like even a comment, which is deleted directly after the creation, changes the oder of the answers. Then it is even absolutely impossible to find the modifications...

Answer 11

[Andrew Newell]

My Answers should display the number of votes for the answers, not the questions.

Answer 12

[Andrew Newell]

Allow links to a specific answer, not just the question it answers.

[Andrew Newell]

That could be tricky! Answers don't currently have their own Web addresses.

[Lindsay Coutinho]

We have added a link from the "Accepted answer" message to the answer itself. Keep the feedback coming!

[Walter Roberson]

I have figured out how to use the existing interface to get the tags to a particular answer.

Hover over the "add a comment" link for the answer you wish to construct a direct URL to. You will see a link such as,

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/answers/1459/comments/new

Pull out the number before "comments" and construct the anchor as #answer_ followed by the number, such as #answer_1459 . That is the relative anchor, to which you would prefix the page URL, such as this page's URL

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/994-wish-list-for-matlab-answer-sections

The net result would be

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/994-wish-list-for-matlab-answer-sections#answer_1459

This URL will _not_ change when the display algorithm reorders the answers due to voting or however it determines what should go first on the page.

[Andrew Newell]

I just noticed this. Good sleuthing!

[Image Analyst]

Walter, I suggest that you extract this comment and post it in Answers with the subject "How to refer to an existing Answer or Comment via a link" or something similar. You should also apply the tag "tutorial" to it. I think more people would then use it and it would make it easier to find. Whenever I want to find your instructions here, it takes a bit of a search. Making it tagged "tutorial" would make it so much easier to find. This information is so useful that it deserves to be it's own top level entry, not a comment buried in fifty thousand other comments.

[Daniel Shub]

@IA, I have already done that (well it has a slightly different text). I also added the tutorial tag as you suggested in a comment to that question: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/36487-linking-to-an-answer

[Image Analyst]

You're right. I'm not sure why I didn't see it at first. Maybe there are too many non-tutorial answers tagged as tutorial when they shouldn't be because they're just regular answers saying how to do something specific, such as this one: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/19062-fprintf-table or unanswered requests for a tutorial, such as this one http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/32107-manage-oceanoptics. I might untag some and get rid of the clutter so that only real tutorials are in there.

[Randy Souza]

We made it easier to find these in a release on June 27, 2012. Click on the "Link" button next to an answer or above a comment.

Here's a blog post describing the major changes.

[Walter Roberson]

Nice, Randy!

Answer 13

[Andrew Newell]

The accept button should be further away from Comment on this answer, and it should be possible to undo it - at least for a grace period of a few minutes.

[Walter Roberson]

Looks like this has been implemented in the last couple of minutes!

[Walter Roberson]

The further-away part, anyhow.

[Andrew Newell]

It's a start!

Answer 14

[Walter Roberson]

Andrew mentioned as part of a previous suggestion that My Answers should include a search box. The same should also hold true when viewing someone's profile.

Go to my Answers and try to find something specific in there. With over 700 Answers logged already, good luck in finding what you are looking for...

The situation would not be as bad if the existing search box supported a tag for author search (and if author names were unique.)

[Walter Roberson]

I think My Answers needs to be paged: at 50 per page, I'd already have 23 pages or so, and that is only going to get longer.

[Walter Roberson]

Reminder: I'd already be at 35 pages at 50 per page. With no search box and 1700+ linear answers, finding something specific is unwieldy.

[Walter Roberson]

My Answers is now paged, 50 per page! I'm up to page 44 ;-)

There is, though, no obvious way to change the ordering, which is currently oldest to newest -- and there is no ">> Last" button so unless one cheats and edits the URL, finding the newest ones can be time-consuming.

[Andrew Newell]

As a result of paging, user-specific search is needed even more.

[Matt Tearle]

Adding my vote for ordering options on the "my answers" page. Helen, any chance you will see this (buried in the mammoth thread)...?

[Helen Chen]

Hi Matt - Yes, I did notice. Randy is working on this one. :-)

[Image Analyst]

But it took 21 days to see Matt's post. ;-) There has to be a better/faster way to find new posts since last time you looked at a post.

[Helen Chen]

As of last night, when you look at My Answers, it is now sorting by most recent. Enjoy!

Answer 15

[Oleg Komarov]

We wanna see our reputation scores, let the challenge begin!

Smt like a Users list by score under the Home link (upper left corner)

Oleg

[Andrew Newell]

Bring it on.

[Lindsay Coutinho]

The Contributors list has just been added, it's located under Home link. Check it out: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors . Keep the feedback coming!

[Andrew Newell]

Very nice! Sorry, Oleg - it looks like your program has become obsolete.

Answer 16

[Andrew Newell]

Adding a button for inserting images. Even though instructions for adding an image can be found in Markup help, more than one user has been unaware that it could be done (including one on this page!).

[Jan]

And store the images on a MathWorks server. The other hosters will delete the images in the near or far future and then the corresponding question will become meaningless.

Answer 17

[jiro]

A way to automatically scroll to the most recent answer/comment/edit. For example, this question has many, many answers and comments. But I don't know where the most recent stuff is. Perhaps there should be a "go to next recent content" button on the page, that takes me to different sections.

[Matt Tearle]

Or a "sort by" option? (default = ranking, but date is an option)

[Andrew Newell]

I like "sort by" - more flexibility.

[Walter Roberson]

The sort order is more complicated than ranking. I have not been able to figure it out. The very newest unvoted comment is usually at the bottom, but the other recent comments often appear at the beginning of the list of other comments with their same vote rank. As if a ranking hypothesis that a comment that has been around for a while and not attracted many votes is lower rank than a newer comment that has the same number of votes.

[Ashish Uthama]

A color indication for new things since your last visit/refresh which goes away after you scroll past it? (Doubt this being practical though).

[Walter Roberson]

Inspired by Ashish's color-coding suggestion:

Individual entries in lists of Questions could be color-coded according to how long ago there was activity on the Question.

I have seen some systems color-code by how "hot" a topic is -- topics that are getting responses quickly recently are "hotter" than topics which have gone inactive. I do not know what algorithm is used to determine "hotness", but I could probably come up with something plausible-sounding ;-)

[Walter Roberson]

The sorting order for Answers has been changed to newest-first, it appears. That has some advantages, but increases the priority of being able to jump to new material.

[Randy Souza]

This is a regression--we will change it back to votes-first soon.

[Walter Roberson]

Ah, I notice that the recent activity information at the top of the Question display, is now a direct link to that activity. That helps for the very most recent change, but not so much if multiple changes have been made.

[Randy Souza]

The sorting regression is fixed--answers should now display with the accepted answer first, then the remaining answers sorted by number of votes (high-to-low) then date/time asked (least-to-most recent)

Answer 18

[Andrew Newell]

Walter mentioned a "Best of Answers" area. A more flexible alternative would be an "Add to my favorites" button, so we can each keep a list of answers that we find really useful.

Of course, we can always bookmark them in our browser, but it would be good to keep them in the same environment as our personal questions and answers.

[Walter Roberson]

That's an interesting idea, Andrew.

[Walter Roberson]

Though the Best of Answers would be aimed more at the incoming people who are willing to do *some* searching but would get lost in the unstructured morass that exists now.

[Andrew Newell]

I get lost in the morass too. Recently I spent fifteen minutes trying to find a particular answer and gave up.

Answer 19

[Matt Fig]

A "Views" counter for the questions.

Answer 20

[Walter Roberson]

When one is being shown a list of Questions, it would be nice if hovering over a question link would show you a brief summary (e.g., first 100-ish characters) of the question statement. This would make it faster for people to take a quick look to see whether the question was interesting, or a quick reminder of exactly which question it was.

[Walter Roberson]

Still on my wish-list! Was wanting this again about 2 days ago...

Answer 21

[Oleg Komarov]

1. More meta info about the contributors: num. of votes given, num. of comments...
2. Keep the meta info separate from answers/questions: try to load Walter's profile...it takes already a lot of time and if he keeps at this rythm in a year it won't be possible to load it at all...

I'm trying to think of long run stable way to query the site to have a score of the contributors. You can see an attempt in User reputation: post here to get into the list. It already takes 6 minutes to retrieve that info.

In general, it would be nicer if the list of the contributors and the meta info was available at one shot (and basically this is what I'm trying to reproduce)

EDIT

TMW team implemented a page with the metascores: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors

Please refer to it and congrats to the team!

Answer 22

[Walter Roberson]

Somewhere or other in the documentation, we need a note saying plainly that when a Title is edited, the effect is to create a URL which aliases the old one. For example, I had

 http:.../4321-j-random-title

and after I renamed it, that continued to be valid in addition to the new name

http:.../4321-john-q-title

This behavior of keeping the old name accessible can be important because URLs may have been created linking to the old name. This is a good feature; documenting it would save people like me from having to worry about such things.

[Walter Roberson]

Interesting... the behavior is not quite what I thought it was. It is not that aliases are created, but rather that as long as the number and dash are there, followed by any non-meta character (e.g., excluding '?'), then the match will be found. In the above example, http:.../4321-* would work just as well.

This is, incidentally, a way to link to a question by number without having to remember or copy/paste the entire title.

[Randy Souza]

Technically, the dash is not needed either. So, for example, you can get to this question via:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/994

Answer 23

[Matt Tearle]

Some way to prevent questions being deleted without a good reason!

I'm getting really annoyed with people whose response to your help is to disappear and take with them both their question and your response to it. It's happened more than once to me, and not necessarily questions where the poster was doing something dumb -- perfectly normal question, valid answer(s), then... floop! It's gone.

[Daniel Shub]

What really upsets me about a question that I have answered being deleted is I never can remember who asked the question. My feeling is if you are going to delete a question that I have answered, then I am not going to answer any of your other questions (at least until I think you have learned better).

[Randy Souza]

We implemented a partial constraint on this behavior in a release on June 27, 2012. You can no longer delete your own question once someone has answered it.

Here's a blog post describing the major changes.

Answer 24

[Sean de Wolski]

A "How many users are online" string somewhere on the home page.

[Matt Fig]

That would be cool!

[Walter Roberson]

Perhaps a bit difficult to define. If I'm composing a reply, in at least one sense I am "online", but the composition is taking place entirely in my browser.

Counting the number of people authenticated on the web site is not useful either: I'm typically authenticated for over a week at a time.

"Transactions per minute per distinct IP address" would start to get closer, but that would be skewed if multiple people are reaching it through the same IP address -- e.g., large portions of the organization I work for all interact through the same public IP address with Network Address Translation.

[Matt Fig]

How about how many people are logged on to MATLAB central? That would at least give an approximation...

[Walter Roberson]

"logged on to MATLAB centeral" is the same thing as "authenticated to the web site" that I wrote about.

[Matt Fig]

Oh, o.k. You confused me with your technical speak. ;-)

Answer 25

[Paulo Silva]

I would like to have a way to see when someone's account was created and how many questions that person deleted (maybe even the names of the questions deleted for those who are editors), this is because I clearly remember having answered several questions from someone but all those questions were deleted and the very same person posted a new question yesterday, I replied and that person exhibited the same old behaviour that triggered my memory, he/she didn't even look at the links I provided and asked something that isn't MATLAB related, I didn't answer the specific question because I would waste my time, this is MATLAB Answers not Control Engineering Answers.

[Sean de Wolski]

I think it would be fair to make it so that an answer couldn't be deleted by its OP once someone had answered. I guess they could still edit away all of the information but it would at least appear as a question on their profile.

[Sean de Wolski]

And not delete someone's really thought out answer. (I know I like to reference old answers frequently. I also keep all working code I post here (and images) in 'ans###.m' script files with ### being the month and day (yes I'll face a mini Y2K next January :) ) )

[Oleg Komarov]

Agree on: no delete if already answered.

[Sean de Wolski]

Or at least answered by someone else. If you want to delete a question you answered yourself, I don't really see an issue.

[Walter Roberson]

Although it is true that in theory this forum is about MATLAB, I find that in practice there are a lot of more questions about theory posed, or questions about theory that are disguised as MATLAB questions.

A fair bit of the time, "How do I do {something} in MATLAB" really means "I barely know what {something} is, but I have to implement it in MATLAB: how do I do that, preferably without ever having to learn anything about what the {something} really means or the mathematics behind it?"

I do admit that is the cynical view from having dealt with large number of students; I _do_ see people (including some of the students) who are interested in their topic, but are lacking the background in it and are also perhaps weak on their research skills (or research initiative) to investigate before trying to implement.

[Randy Souza]

We implemented "no delete if already answered" in a release on June 27, 2012. Click on the "Link" button next to an answer or above a comment.

Here's a blog post describing the major changes.

Answer 26

[Oliver Woodford]

Many questions get asked again and again. Why? Because people are not searching for previous answers before asking questions.

Stackoverflow suggests some similar questions that have already been asked when people are typing in their questions. It's therefore easy for them to see that the questions already exist.

This system also relies on good questions being voted up, so they appear at the top of the list. I have asked several (dare I say) well-worded questions (and usually answered them well too), with a view to providing a resource for people to refer to. This effort is wasted by the questions and answers receiving no votes, and the fact that people never search for them anyway.

So, TMW please implement question suggestions like Stackoverflow, and regular users please vote for well-worded questions.

[K E]

Just curious, why is Matlab answers separate from Stackoverflow? I would like to combine all my reputation points (low as they are) in one place.

Answer 27

[Walter Roberson]

• Whether Preview is automatic or manual (or the switch-over point) should be a user preference.

[Andrew Newell]

What do you mean by the switch-over point?

[Walter Roberson]

If you type a long enough answer, then the automatic preview switches off, according to a cssm post on the topic. I don't know how big "long enough" is.

Jan for one gets badly badly hit by the time for formatting the preview at the server side, and was glad to see the manual preview... until it turned out not to be manual until below some unidentified lenght.

[Walter Roberson]

I finally encountered the typing limit and had it switch over to non-automatic preview. It was a fair bit of typing, and at one point I had typed a full line ahead of what had been echoed. :(

[Jan]

@Walter: Another method is creating a short answer at first (I suggest *you* use: "This is Walter's thread" :-) ), relaod the question page and hit the "Edit" button before the page is loaded completely. Then you get the ugly small input box in the top left corner - *without* a preview! Cruel, but better than waiting minutes after typing just some lines.

[Walter Roberson]

Jan indicated yesterday in another thread that he is getting quite badly hit by the slow speed of the automatic preview.

[Randy Souza]

We added a disable/enable button for the preview in a release on June 27, 2012.

Here's a blog post describing the major changes.

[Walter Roberson]

Hurrah!

Answer 28

[Walter Roberson]

• For the benefit of those of us that like to do some infrastructure maintenance, it would be appreciated if there was a way to select questions that had no tag, or that had no Product . Especially in conjunction with the "next question" button that I proposed, this would make it much easier to step through postings adding appropriate meta information.

Answer 29

[Igor]

Perhaps,

to group questions on Category (and create category list)

keywords do not enough

[Jan]

This would be a great advantage. I've never worked with Simulink, so it is more efficient not to read Simulink questions.

[Walter Roberson]

Looks like this has been at least partly implemented.

Answer 30

[George Evers]

I like the idea of checking for relevant answers before posting a new question. As mentioned at [1], neural nets would be one vehicle for accomplishing this; alternatively, consider the following routine, for which x and y could be optimized.

Maintain a database of URL's, keywords, and tags for existing articles, threads, and questions.
For each new question title proposed:
* Define X as the set of all words of length > x from the user's proposed title.
* Search the database for articles/threads/questions whose keywords and tags match y% of the members of X.
* Display "Do any of the following answer your question?"
* Display best matches.

Implementing a quality search procedure now could prevent unnecessary clutter and avoid the difficulty of deciding whose answers to delete should cleanup otherwise potentially become necessary. This would help answerers by politely encouraging common sense questioning practices with which to prevent redundant and unnecessary questions, and users would feel more intelligently assisted and locate answers more quickly.

The dual objectives would be time-efficient search and high-quality user feedback. Search time might be reduced by categorizing questions and searching only within relevant categories. And recommendation quality could be optimized by using a modern optimizer to maximize the recommendation success rate per 100 questions on the 2D search space defined by x and y [2].

1. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/301724#818324
2. http://www.georgeevers.org/HESTEC_poster.jpg

 Regards,
 George
 http://www.georgeevers.org

[Walter Roberson]

Small adjustment to the footnoted URL:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/301724#816795

goes directly to the posting with the mention of checking relevant answers

[Walter Roberson]

George, unfortunately people are usually pretty bad at selecting titles. We've seen a lot of cssm postings with titles like, "Help me! Urgent!"

A problem with the keywords and product tags being used is that for that to be effective, those fields have to be actively maintained and regularized -- typos corrected, similar concepts replaced by already-existing tags, someone has to go through and add the tags because most posters don't add much more than the tag "matlab".

Maintaining the tags is tedious business with little reward. One has to read and understand the problem (and solutions and comments proposed so far), and remember the standardized tags developed so far, and and do the tag adding... and move on to the next question. I handled that for the first 325 questions (ex-officio) but it took me hours, got me no reputation points, and I haven't a clue whether anyone found the effort worth-while.

On another system with a non-technical topic, I turned in to the main maintainer of the tags. I had a mental list of close to 100 different tags I applied (which required reading every posting), and burned out on that quickly. I dropped down to 30-ish tags and was still burning out. I posted there asking for assistance and got no offers of help. I dropped down to about 11 tags... and still burned out. I posted again asking for help, sent private messages to some of the people most active in those topics asking for help... and got one "Well, maybe I'll try". After a couple of months I dropped my commitment down to 3 tags only. I still couldn't keep up. I haven't officially given up, but now I only bother to with 3 or 4 different tags there and only if I feel like going through the bother for individual messages. No-one there has expressed any feeling of loss or regret that the tags were not being maintained.

I am not going to be caught in the same time bind again. Despite what it sometimes looks like ;-) I only have a finite amount of time to devote here. I certainly do not mind carrying a _share_ of the load -- provided that it is clear that others are also carrying a share of the load. And provided there is some evidence that the tagging is being effective at helping people find information or helping people solve problems.

[jiro]

George, I like this idea a lot. This happens quite a bit in CSSM where people *may* search for things, but ultimately end up posting his/her own question (which happens to be the same as 10 other questions). I think the interface can be changed to encourage the "search first" behavior.

Right now, there is a Search bar where you can type in keywords. There's also a separate "Ask a Question" button. The first problem is that some people will always go straight to "Ask a Question". Having two separate interfaces (search and ask) gives the user options, and it becomes hard to enforce the behavior.

Now once a user asks a question, we could do something that you suggest which is to give some recommendations on existing questions. But we run into the issue that Walter mentions, which is that some people don't provide meaningful titles. Some titles have nothing to do with what they actually ask.

So what I think is that they should get rid of the "Ask a Question" button. There should only be an edit window that says "What is your question?". With that wording (as opposed to "Search MATLAB Answers"), people would hopefully ask the question using natural spoken grammar. They certainly won't type "help!" or "Plz give me code!" because that's not a question. It would force users to type descriptive questions. Based on that question, the system can go through and search the Answers database to come up with some candidates that may be relevant to the asked question. This part is the same as your idea. If the user doesn't see anything relevant, then he/she can go ahead and fill in the rest of the question (description, tags, products).

[Andrew Newell]

Walter's experience with tags is exactly why I think that it would be better to just use Google for searching MATLAB Answers (see my separate answer). Why try to reinvent the wheel when someone else does it so much better? This would be quite consistent with many of the other proposals in this discussion.

[Jan]

See this about tags also: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/33319-is-matlab-or-matlab-code-a-useful-tag

Answer 31

[Jan]

I do not like to be tracked by Google-Analytics. In Germany it is currently checked, if this service conflictes with the laws for data protection.

It is obvious that participating in a newsgroup is not very private at all. Nevertheless I see no reason to let Google know my IP, such that they can check if I've opened a browser window for Ebay or Amazon, while I'm posting at MATLAB Answers. Or does anyone needs informations like this: "People who have bought this book have been interested in these questions also: ..."

So my wish is: Disable tracking by Google-Analytics.

[Walter Roberson]

With Firefox and the Abine and NoScript extensions, I have enough control to disable cookies on a site by site basis.

On the other hand, unless I change my username, there isn't much that can be done about the fact that google is going to index the 'Walter Roberson' author against the content I write -- not without disallowing google from indexing the site, which would have many disadvantages.

[Jan]

Google-Analytics is an online service, which stores your IP-address. This is another quality than indexing the text you've posted here. If you browse through Ebay or other web sites controlled by GA, Google has enough information to perform the cross-correlations. If you browse this page from your IPhone with enabled IPv6 and did not enable the privacy control, Google knows even your unique MAC address.

I'm using NoScript also - otherwise it is hard to register that GA scans the users of MATLAB Answers.

Answer 32

[Walter Roberson]

Documentation (and on-line help) of the search capabilities.

Known but not documented:

• string to be searched for in the body
• tag:"tag string"
• product:"product string"

Thought I saw:

• a prefix for searching by author. I can't reproduce this, not through author:"author name", not through author:contributornumber

Possibly it was in the newsgroup that I saw this supported.

Unknown and not documented:

• any other supported prefixes
• whether terms are phrases or "and" or "or", or if words not found at all are silently dropped and a search done on the rest.
• whether terms are case sensitive -- or can be made to be
• whether there is a spelling-correction pre-pass on the search
• whether comments are searched
• whether the search is on the unrendered or rendered form -- in particular, are urls themselves searched for matches

[Andrew Newell]

How do you search for a string within the body? As far as I can tell, it doesn't do that. If I just enter a string, it only looks for questions with that tag.

[Walter Roberson]

For example search for

path

and you will find numerous hits.

But if you search for

grumble

you won't find any hits.

The difference appears to be that it does not search comments (which it should!)

[Walter Roberson]

I have determined at least that the search string with multiple words is "or". It also appears that email addresses of the answerer are part of what is searched -- e.g. searching for "az" will find thread in which one of the answers has an arizona email address.

Indications so far are that comments are _not_ searched.

[Helen Chen]

Try searching for grumble again. Searching through comments has been added. I'll work on getting some documentation for search directives up for you. There are some goodies that have been added with the release this morning (April 11)

[Walter Roberson]

Comment searching is working, hurrah!

[Walter Roberson]

Searching is now "and", but some words are ignored, such as "a" and "the".

Searching is no longer literal. For example, I searched for

roots argument

and that said that http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/4926-lag-with-figure-function matched, but neither of those words appears in that Question: instead "root" appears and "arguments" appears, which shows that at least in some cases the singular and plural are treated equally. But I searched for "skys" and it said no matches were found, so the algorithm is not as simple as ignoring a trailing "s".

[Walter Roberson]

Search term stemming is used! For example if you search on "computability" you will find "computes" and "computing". Common suffixes are stripped off of the input text when the index is generated, and also stripped off of the search terms when a search is done, and matches are determined.

It is _not_ a simple case of matching prefixes. For example if one searches on "compu" then one will find exactly one posting (well other than this one): it is a posting in which someone mistyped "computing" as "compuing". Strip off the common suffix "ing" and "compu" becomes a recognized search term...

[K E]

How do I search for a phrase such as "Simulink debugger"? How do I require that two words both appear in an answer, such as "Simulink" and "optimization"? This is not covered in the documentation (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/about/answers/). I get better results searching the whole web with Google than using the Answers search window.

[Walter Roberson]

"simulink and debugger"

but without the quotes seems to be the current method.

I did test with quotes as well; if I remember correctly I got results that I could not characterize at the time.

ps: dang, took me several minutes of searching to find this update!

Answer 33