What should you post where?
Next Gen threads (#1): features that would break compatibility with previous versions, but would be nice to have
@anyone posting a new thread when the last one gets too large (about 50 answers seems a reasonable limit per thread), please update this list in all last threads. (if you don't have editing privileges, just post a comment asking someone to do the edit)
This topic is for features you would like to see for the MATLAB Answers facility itself, and also for bug reports about the MATLAB Answers facility.
This topic is the follow on to the first Wish-list for MATLAB Answer sections and second MATLAB Answers Wish-list #2 (and bug reports). Those grew large enough to become unwieldy; and Mathworks has made enough changes to make a number of the past points no longer of relevance. More recently there was the limited purpose New design of the forum - grey on white which turned into a bug and wish list; I have renamed that for continuity.
I suggest one wish (or bug report) per answer, so that people can vote their wishes.
369 Comments
For easy navigation and for the historians,
Anyone with edit privileges should feel free to update this whenever needed.
Thanks, Rik.
Sometimes deleting answer after moving is impossible for instance the below thread:
if I try to delete it, shows the following:
Note: I'm not even able to edit or delete my own comment/answer nor comment/answer again in the same thread. This is the second time this is happening.
Why does this happen?
:/ after that thread becomes defunct.
Just to make sure: to confirm it isn't just on the in.mathworks.com server I just attempted to delete that answer. On the www.mathworks.com server I got the same error as you describe.
Thank you for replying Guillaume.
I had an issue recently where I couldn't delete a comment (by somebody else). The red x didn't appear for me. Yet Walter had no problem deleting it. There might be a bug hiding somewhere.
When I press enter to enter a tag to a question MATLAB Release field gets erased.
Maybe it is time for wish list 5.
Even I notice the lag in mobile (it stays for almost 2 secs).
I guess the idea is that if you add a new product to the list, the release list adjust to only the releases that are common to all the products. However, as far as I know all releases have all the products listed, so there's really no point to it. And it's an additional barrier to people actually indicating their version, so it wold be better if the behaviour changed.
P.S: Is it just me or is there noticable lag when typing anything on this particular page (probably due to its size)?
But unfortunately my short term memory wasn’t good at the time :/
Since they went with the very strange setup of only allowing you to enter a release at all if you have first entered a product there are probably only ~5% (if that) of threads that have a release anyway! But I did also notice the bug with adding a product and release disappearing. Thankfully in the one case I did it I noticed and remembered the release and could add it back in.
It doesn't (I just tried it to verify). You meant that when you enter Product, it gets rid of the release. And they know about this bug.
If i ask a question and happen to be the only one who answered it,
please don't nudge me to accept the answer
I think it's a twist on a universal frustration.
I've answered a lot of my own questions, both here and on other forums. To be disappointed and then answer the question myself leaves me wanting something other than a plea to thank someone else.
This goes double if the only reason you sought help was because you felt you had truly exhausted your own ability to solve the problem, and it's all the more maddening when the "answer" was to simply abandon/avoid the problem.
I guess if I had a split personality, I could find a way to thank myself though.
"But I started getting emails from mathworks..."_
Ah! That's rude, indeed! :)
Not what I had presumed the complaint was and kudos to you for showing your regards to respondents. Not everybody, unfortunately, is so considerate--and, not, I'm sure, that they're intending to be in many cases, just not thinking or aware of protocol particularly with the one-time or first-time poster.
Illustrates again the above conversation about why there needs to be ability to select what one gets from TMW on a element basis and why I (and many others) just have notifications "off" globally.
I always make sure to accept a good answer.
But I started getting emails from mathworks to accept my own answer a couple of times.
Well, I guess you're right at least about saving others the effort of reading through
Agree unless there is some issue with an Answer in which case Comment so either the one who answered can respond or others can chime in...
It's rude and can be disheartening to invest (sometimes a reasonable amount of) effort for someone gratis and then have that simply be ignored (as far as can tell with zero feedback).
I have done the nudging on occasion whether only responder or not when it seemed the thread should be closed simply for the purpose of having that indication to those who might otherwise take the time to go look when could be doing something more productive towards an unsolved question.
Why not? If the answer solves the problem, accepting it helps others. It is efficient to mark problems as solved.
One or two things with respect to notification preferences and Activity Feed that I would like:
- Having a preference to not automoatically add Answers threads I comment or answer on to my Activity feed would be great. I click the unfollow (or whatever it is called) box literally every time I am adding a comment or answer. Just having a one time preference to have the default be off and then I can switch on as I wish would be nice.
- Being able to choose what I get e-mail notifications about. At the moment it seems I can just either switch them on or off so I switched them off because I don't want to get spammed about stuff from Matlab Answers, but I would like to have e-mail notifications on for a couple of File Exchange submissions that I follow. I tend to never use my Activity Feed (mostly for the reason above as I don't always remember to untick the follow option) so don't see updates on these toolboxes I am using.
Perfect, forgot about that page. Thanks, Walter.
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/help?s_tid=gn_mlc_ans_hlp
Very interesting to read other people' workflows.
@Walter Roberson, I've been searching for search-options such as the ones you use in the comment above. I'm aware of contributor: tag: question: answer: comment: but I'm curious what other options are available. What is -asked_at:30?
I use mostly Activity Feed. However, because it shows so much (every different Edit shows up for example) then afterwards I end up going to My Answers and My Comments to see if I have missed anything. I also sometimes search
contributor:roberson -asked_at:30
so that I can catch updates to old questions that I might have missed... especially for ones that are from before October 2017 when the subscription service went live.
dpb:
On the main Answers web page, the "Recently Added" view, to the right of "Sort by", there is now "View:" followed by two icons. Click the right hand one to get the view that uses less space.
That's interesting. I used to have the same workflow (check My Answers and My Comments) but when the activity feed was introduced I ditched that and now use the activity feed exclusively. Yes, I wish it was more compact (in particular, collapse multiple consecutive edits into just one change) but for me it works well enough.
The fact TMW still hasn't done anything about the waste of space so that one has to page and page and page to get to anything beyond the first 50 means I just don't.
Mathworks has to go through a fairly rigid process to make change to the website so it takes time. But they are listening to us.
With regards to searching on Answers, yes it's pretty much useless, it can never find what I'm looking for. Google is actually more often useful than mathwork's own search.
I use Adam's protocol--the browser link recall with my user name retrieves each; then the word "sort" retrieve link to the sort I once did on unanswered by most recent. I skim the first page of it and that's it...
I've used the activity feed on a couple of occasions when I was curious who might have voted for an answer... :)
What is difficult as Walter points out is that once have answered as many as even I, a search limited to your own Answers can't seem to find ones you remember you wrote on a given subject that would be useful to link to...so they still go into oblivion.
The fact TMW still hasn't done anything about the waste of space so that one has to page and page and page to get to anything beyond the first 50 means I just don't...
And that is precisely why a thread-view for the activity feed would be useful. That way you don't have to post a comment in order to get it in your My Comments list, but you avoid the level of detail that the activity feed provides. Personally I don't understand why the extremely detailed recent activity feed is exposed to users as well.
My usual modus operandi on visiting Answers is to head straight to My Matlab Answers -> My Answers to check up on any that had activity either since I last checked or if it was my activity in which case obviously I know there is nothing new. Then I do the same for My Comments. Occasionally I check My Questions too, although not often if I haven't asked one in a while. Finally I hit Browse and look at the first page (occasionally, but rarely, the second) to see what is new.
What I would like to use my activity feed for is question threads that I find interesting for some reason, whether or not I have contributed. It gets cluttered so fast though if I forget to unfollow even a handful of threads I comment in or answer so I've never developed a habit of using Activity Feed as I'd like to.
I contribute to far fewer threads than you in general though so checking My answers and My Comments doesn't usually take long since my last login.
By the way, I use Activity Feed a lot. We are currently averaging over 175 new Questions every day, which does not count activity on older questions, so it is easy for updates to scroll off of the front page of 50... off of the first 4 pages even. I am following close to 15000 Questions since Following was introduced in October 2017, and I have apparently Answered more than 40000 historically, so it is not practical for me to keep mental track of which questions I have interacted in just by title...
Using contributor:roberson as my filter unfortunately also matches questions I have only editted...
I looked for one straight away when it was introduced, and did actually mention it in feedback to the Devs when they e-mailed us editors back at that time, but I've only just got around to complaining about it in this thread now, after clicking Unfollow a few thousand times!
When Activity Feed was put in place, there was a preference about whether you wanted to automatically subscribe or not . I cannot seem to find that preference now.
+1 I agree with the preference thing, and the point about granular email notification control.
It would also be nice to have a way of keeping track of unread threads. Sometimes a comment/thread gets drowned in the activity feed (for those of us who do use it).
@TADA - Yep, I click that (almost) every time I respond to a thread (and when I don't it's because I forgot), hence my request!
Yeah, but ya' gotsa' do it every stinkin' time...which is patently annoying and rude can't set the preference.
Hence, like Adam, I pay no attention at all to activity feed 'cuz it's mostly/almost entirely noise don't care about and have the email notification 'off' as well.
Before you follow a thread, there's a check box you can uncheck when you comment/answer in order not to follow that
Fully concur to both...
That all seem reasonable, For your second point, the simplest would be to have a tick box next to each item in the expandable list that you get when you click on See emailed activity details.
One thing I would find useful is some kind of question activity history. This may have been mentioned already in this thread, but that kind of highlights my point. For most questions, it is true, this is not too important as the number of comments and answers is small so if it is one that I have answered or commented on I will check it if the latest activity is something new and will usually notice if there is other new activity in addition to the one highlight as latest.
But for a thread like this one I would have no clue whatsoever if multiple comments or answers were added since I last checked it as there are so many answers, many with lots of comments. So anything other than the most recent activity I am hardly ever likely to see.
Even the ordering of answers gets changed by voting too so you can't use that to easily see a chronology of answers. I know voting serves a useful purpose and having answers that are considered most useful being at the top is handy, but it is also a pain in the backside in long threads where the latest answer gets a vote and suddenly jumps up the ordering.
The ability to sort answers by vote or by newest/oldest first, as you get in many question/answer forums would be nice.
I guess it can be useful for that. My activity feed is usually very empty because I purposely turn off the option to follow a thread every single time I answer or comment (an option to do this automatically would be great!) because I find it utterly useless for what I would really want if I leave it on and it fills with clutter. I guess I could add the handful of long threads like this to it though.
The activity feed does help out here, but because all edits end up in there, it does tend to get swamped if one question you follow has a lot of edits. I think it is an improvement relative to the old update list, but I think there is still a lot of room for improvement.
It is an annoyance, but since it doesn't have too much of an effect, I think fixing changing this shouldn't be at the top of the priority list. But it should be on the list.
I would put a hard character limit of (say) 50 characters on the Title -- mandate that the question is in the text, do NOT even let them try to cram everything into the title. It would be agoodthing™ if the text would go red or some other hint the title is too long after about half that number...
Yes, the scrolling bug is extremely annoying. However, I think we were told that it only happens with Firefox. My understanding is that fixing the bug requires a new release of the editor component, so not a trivial update.
Somebody on the team had to meet their performance objective measurements, no doubt! :)
Yes, that annoying scrolling thing is most annoying, virtually preventing any answer more than a page long. I told them of this like a month ago or so and told them that it needs urgent attention, more than anything else. But they rolled out a new update very recently without this being fixed. SIGH.
Can you check the text in the Answer isn't blank first before allowing Submit? It seems I recall that was the one that pushed me over the top when I finally posted that had 20 lines or so in the titel but the Q itself was still empty...or maybe it had a token "please help" or somesuch.
Like the "huh?" I put on the Title of a Q? I posted the other day when it was mandated there be four words where a three-word title seemed fully sufficient, the rules don't seem to have a lot of relevance to what they're trying to accomplish in places.
Now if could fix the focus when the Answer or Question text rolls past the screen such that every keystroke makes the window jump to the top of the window so can't see what you're typing... :( I'm pretty sure I've seen somebody else already made it a topic/complaint but it's surely annoying.
[Answers Dev]
Thank you for sharing! We recently rolled-out a change which updated the label of the first field on the 'Ask a Question' page from 'Question' to 'Title.' We are hoping that this label change will help clear some of the confusion and would be a good first step towards having shorter & concise content for the Title.
We will keep an eye on this and consider your sguesstions as we contiue to work on updates to this page.
It sometimes happens that someone posts a question, recieves some comments, doesn't respond to them, and posts a duplicate. When I post a comment on either (or close the duplicate), both questions are deleted, without the contact option enabled in the user profile. Sometimes the user also changes their username.
I'm not sure what would be the best solution to deal with these annoying events (other than shrug my shoulders and move on). Maybe something like requiring 10 rep to delete your own question? I would like to flag the question aksing the devs to restore, but there is nothing to flag anymore.
Sometimes some contributors put a lot of effort into the comments already, which are a great help to get the question clear enough to answer, which sometimes results in the OP solving it on their own. If the question is deleted this effort is now almost wasted (OP has no permanent record to go back to, and others can't benefit).
(If someone thinks this is better suited to it's own thread, I'll be happy to repost as a question.)
What Guillaume describes has been a problem. The process of working out what is really needed can be quite valuable, and it can be frustrating to have it disappear.
Generally speaking, I wish people who post relevant material or participate meaningfully in finding the correct solution, would not delete their Answer just because it was not the one that was Accepted. The process is part of the solution.
I find that most of the time an answer that has comments would be better left intact. However, it is true that sometimes there is an answer that is on the wrong track or gives incorrect responses, and in those cases when someone points out why the answer is not relevant, then it can sometimes be appropriate for the poster of the Answer to delete it.
Note that we cannot move comments or answers (I wish!). We can only copy and paste these into a new comment or answer under our own name and delete the original. Usually we spot the misplaced comment/answer before there's even been a response, so it's not usually an issue.
I'm more concerned with the more common case where somebody answers the question and it's not exactly what the OP want, so it's followed by a bunch of comments on the answer where we actually find out what's needed until somebody else gives the required answer. At this points, the first answerer delete his answer as it's not accepted and whoosh, the whole discussion that lead to the correct answer is gone.
"For that matter, even answers with comment shouldn't be deleted"
I disagree - those of us without sufficient reputation post comments below answers that are themselves comments. Then the MVP types can move it for us, safely deleting the answer-that-is-a-comment along with my comment that it is such.
Well, yes, if you post content for which you're not the copyright holder, you can't of course license it under any license.
@Guillaume: "when you post on Answer, you agree that your post is covered by Creative Commons so it is no longer yours exclusively." This cannot concern code, which was not your property before. When I post code owned by MathWorks, it will not be available under the CC afterwards, but removed from the forum. So if a user posts the PDF of his homework question, his teacher can force him or MathWorks to remove it.
I'm fairly certain that posters weren't able to close or delete their own questions in the past. That's a fairly recent policy change, not even reflected on the privilege documentation actually, and one I don't particularly agree with.I'd rather any question with a comment can't be deleted. For that matter, even answers with comment shouldn't be deleted.
My interpretation of the GDPR is that a post on Answers is not impacted by it since the GDPR/right to be forgotten covers personally identifiable information, which are not normally present in answers. On the other hand, when you post on Answer, you agree that your post is covered by Creative Commons so it is no longer yours exclusively.
@Rik: Maybe shrugging the shoulders is the best approach. It will work also for users, who ignore the answers, e.g. because it was a homework question and the deadline was yesterday. Lost work is not a highlight and I hope this happens rarely. It is like gifts on Christmas: you cannot control if the receiving person is happy.
If you see, that a person deletes many questions, contacting the forum admins is most likely the best idea.
Erasing and restoring one's posted data is not so clear cut. There are some legal requirements and some gray areas. I'm sure you've heard of Europe's "right to be forgotten", codified in GDPR, which I remember as "G*d d*mn Privacy Rules". You can find them here in this link. Not all countries have privacy rules covering individuals (notably, China doesn't according to Wikipedia) but sometimes companies, since they send web pages all over the world, apply some policies uniformly. Though it appear that often the "erasure" operations are a fairly manual one, I'd guess that sometimes companies don't do it for requests from some countries (I'm just guessing).
One possible exception for restoring posts the poster deleted is "Other exceptions are if the processing of data which is subject to an erasure request is necessary to comply with legal obligations, for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes or for the defence of legal claims." So that might be a justification for restoring the post, if the Mathworks wants to take the risk that restoring the data for public viewing was one of those reasons.
Wikipedia has a long list of court cases related to gray area situations.
Can we remove/kill that annoying popup about the new RTE that comes up every time try to edit a response to make a correction or addendum????
Sorry for the inconvenience.
If you go through all 4 popup screens, and then click 'GOT IT' on the last screen, it will go away permanently.
Recently I encountered few OPs editing the question text. It really isn't good because all the efforts made by the answerers becomes useless. It would be great to mark the OP when he/she does that so no next time when the OP posts a question others know he/she edits the question text which would save time.
It would be good if questions could be locked for editing (the question, that is, not answers, further answers etc) when they have an accepted answer, though this would likely only help in a handful of cases anyway since the type of people who go around editing away their questions are often the ones who don't accept answers anyway.
"I restore some deleted messages from time to time, but I do not feel really comfortable with it".
The best thing is to flag such messages and let Rena restore them. She usually does it once a week. In particular, the latest deletion by dahyun/Gizay Yilmaz, I would let mathworks deal with it as it's completely out of line.
That's really informative Jan, Thank you
It happens about 10 times per week that a user deletes the text of the question, after answers have been posted. This might be a wrong trial to mark a question as solved. Some users try to "close" their questions, because this term is used for marking an accepted solution in other forums. Therefore I assume, that most of the users are not aware how counterproductive this deleting is. Then it would be overdoing to ban them. A notification from the official MathWorks stuff would be sufficient, in my opinion. Usually a comment from the editors has an effect already.
I restore some deleted messages from time to time, but I do not feel really comfortable with it.
Yes you are right , thanks for clarifying Guillaume.
Yes, it would be useful to have the ability to flag users. However, the need is sufficiently rare and only benefitting to us power users that I don't see it being high on Mathworks priority list.
On the other hand, these users are typically students, so if you flag them/ban them, they'll just create a new account.
The new WYSIWYG text editor on Matlab Answers is not Mobile friendly.
So far I've noticed:
- New Word Always Starts With A Capital Letter
- touching anywhere on the editor after typing a word cut&pastes that word to that location
- Can't paste text from clip-board
tested using a Xiaomi Redmi 3S with GBoard (google onscreen keyboard)
you were right about the capitalization, turning off the auto capitalization in the beginning of a sentence works around that issue.
I just noticed that sometimes the last word typed is deleted when using swipe typing (GBoard)
also auto corrections cannot be undone by backspacing (particularly annoying when writing a for loop example)
Do you have GBoard set to automatically capitalize at the beginning of sentences ? I noticed with Swiftkey that it does not know it is in a text area and so thinks every word is the beginning of a sentence.
I noticed your point (2) when I used Samsung keyboard. I do not get that far using Swiftkey, as it is too much of a mess with Swiftkey.
Samsung keyboard is refusing to paste: I think it does not know that any of the areas are text areas, including any popups I might get such as for inserting URL. Swiftkey is able to paste, but it has a different input buffer than Samsung, so I need to switch to Swiftkey, do the copy from the appropriate location, navigate to where I want the paste to occur, and do the paste, and then switch back to Samsung keyboard (Swiftkey making too much of a mess to use.)
The alignment changes when for example a matrix with certain rows and columns is edited using a code button in the new editor
EDITED:
This happens in mobile , as you can see the missalignment in mobile.
@Guillaume at the moment I am not able to find that comment with the issue once i find ill share the link here , @sir Walter I understand your point .
Code is shown in a monospaced font, which would change the alignment of anything designed for proportional spacing.
Can you describe the problem in more details? I'm not sure I understand?
If a question is closed, you cannot write a comment anymore. E.g. this question was already closed, but since it was the first question by this user, I wanted to refer them to the tutorial (and the homework guidelines). It appears to be the case that the new editor doesn't appear for comments either (as the answer field is correctly blocked).
Yes noticed it today
It would be great if it‘s possible to edit answers or comments the code like in the old editor(mobile) now it is hard to separate the code from text. After the code button is pressed there is no problem with it but once if it interpreted as text it becomes a lot of work to convert it to code.
Ah Thank you Guillaume that's my point actually . In addition to that;
As you know when you edit someone's code in the old editor you can just select the whole code and press the code button to edit properly but in the new editor you can't edit the code by pressing the code button using the mobile phone.
Madhan,
Can you describe the problem you're having in more details. I'm fairly old school so don't use my mobile to interact with Answers but if there are issues with it, it's something we can discuss with Mathworks to get them to improve it. But we need to understand the problem first.
Ok, I actually tried to write this post on my mobile. Initially I didn't have too much problem. Frustratingly, while swiping worked for writing words, the autoinsertion of spaces didn't and selecting a different word than the autoselect appended the newly selected word instead of replacing the autoselection.
And yes, trying to add a code line completely messed up the post. Trying to delete the code line deleted other parts of the post. It doesn't work at all.
I'll be reporting that to Mathworks now.
QWERTY keyboard sir
Which keyboard app are you using on iOS ?
Yes sir Walter , I am using iOS though but as I mentioned earlier editing something is hectic in new editor
Are you referring to access using a smartphone?
Using Android with MATLAB Answers is currently pretty useless for anyone using Swiftkey keyboard. It is a bit better but not great for Samsung Keyboard. I have not tried it with Swype.
Since the new editor has become way more fancy:
A while back I read in some help page for the Answers forum that a referrence to a function should be the name in monospace with a hyperlink to the doc page. It would be helpful to have this automated via a button in the 'insert' part of the toolbar (complete with the doc-page search bar).
Also, are there plans to try to expose the text of comments/answers to the browser spell checker? I rely on it embarassingly often, so it would be helpful to still have it. I just tried if it was specific to Chrome on W10, but Firefox has the same issue (or feature?)
The old <url text> is now [text](url).
I fail to understand why there was any need to do that.
And why both "underscore-text-underscore" and "star-text-star" yield italicized text instead of italicized and bold, respectively, is hard to follow reasoning behind???
Por-tip: if you want to use a copy-pasted comment, you need to finish the keyboard shortcuts yourself. So pasting in a full [label](url) will not work, but if you only paste in [label](url and then type the close paren it does work.
Or maybe it is just time to make an elaborate autohotkey file...
I don't know how I missed it the first time I looked at it, but in the help page there is a list of keyboard shortcuts. It list 3 different methods of inserting urls. The old <url text> is now [text](url).
This voids my main issue with inserting urls with the new editor. I just have to get used to the new shortcuts.
I still think that the url field in the CTRL+K dialog box is much too short.
I also think that the pop-up that shows the target when you hover a url in a post is much too narrow, wrapping a long url over many lines, making it much harder to decipher.
II noticed that on desktop that if you type <> around a plain url then it is converted to a link, but that the old syntax of <url text> is not supported . Neither one appears to work with mobile .
@Guillaume, I missed your comment, but no, I'm not on that mailing list (yet?), so I'll confine my complaints to this page ;)
I have already complained on the answers-editor mailing list (not sure you're on it Rik) that hyperlinking to the doc is now a lot more complicated than it used to be. Certainly, now I don't bother making the hyperlink monospace. Too many keypresses required. I will keep on complaining until it's fixed.
I have noticed that Firefox on desktop and Android do not recognize the input area as being text areas, which is probably why the spell checker is not active.
+1 on both...particularly for some of our non-native English speakers, it might help significantly in clarity of posing their Q?.
I wish the ability to Delete or Close a Q? while someone is preparing an Answer could be disabled -- several times I have just finished a detailed response to a Q? and go to post and discover the Q? is no longer visible. It's really frustrating.
Latest was just yesterday on a Q? that had to do with stock market weekly averages -- both Walter and I had posted comments trying to lead the poster down the path (in somewhat differing directions, but that's useful, too) and I finally decided to just illustrate how retime could solve his problem in one line and had prepared a really nice (I think! :) ) demo and BAM! Black hole... :(
If the poster subsequently chooses to delete or some other editor thinks inappropriate or whatever, well, ok, I can accept that as being inevitable occasionally but in this case as in the others I can recall I think it was a legitimate-enough question (albeit from a naive user) that the answer/demo would be worthwhile even if the OP never came back.
Walter, I'd suggest that suggestion (so to speak :) ) is worthy of its own Answer as a forum enhancement.
@Walter I bet some people already have a system like that on their own, but having it on this site in the first place would indeed be really useful.
I feel that there should not be any trust ratings built in to the system. I think that it is too subjective and exposes too much risk of abuse.
However, sometimes it would be useful if you could attach private notes, visible only to you, to profiles. This would allow you to create an entry like "trashed questions after answer" or "asks good questions" or "knows a lot about CANBUS" for your own use. For this to be most useful, appearances of the username should be marked with a "you made notes about this person" icon.
That's good point and would solve probably 95+% of the cases...and all the ones I've come across.
It's not the end of the world kind of a problem but is (at least to me) really, really annoying when it does happen.
My preference would be to not allow posters who don't have sufficient privileges to delete or close questions that have had a comment or answer. If they really want to question closed/deleted they can ask for it (in a comment or with a flag) and a person with enough experience can make a judgement whether or not there is nothing of value in the comments/answer and close/delete it if so.
Posters can still close/delete their own questions if they've had no feedback. Yes, it doesn't solve the fact that it can happen while you're busy writing an answer. It can be frustrating but it's fairly rare.
The advantage of that is that it requires no change in infrastructure. The mechanism is already implemented.
When you delete a question (or an answer for that matter) that have been commented/answered, you not only delete your own content but also somebody's else content, content which they may feel is valuable.
I wouldn't try to lock edits, multiple answers aren't all necessarily bad; often they're sufficiently different approaches as to be worthwhile tutorial info. Even if they're the same or nearly so, "no harm, no foul!". If desired, a "came-in-second" responder can always delete theirs to clean up the thread if wish to at any time.
I'd just have it prevent deletion/close for the duration of the edit and some period after...all the Q? I've had such an experience with are of sufficient content I don't see them as really needing deletion even if the OP were to think "what's the point?" when what he's getting is prompting rather than spoon-fed answer which is what I think happened in the specific case that (finally) prompted the request.
I'll grant it may be difficult to actually implement owing to the distributed nature, but "if you don't ask"... :)
The number of comments indicate it's obviously hit enough as to be a topic worthy of consideration for possible enhancement.
@dpb: A lock would be useful. But then I have less collisions with users deleting their question than with Walter, who posts a sufficient answer while I'm still typing. Implementing such a lock might be very hard. Consider, that the current database is not ACID proof: There are several threads with 2 accepted answers. Sometimes an answer posted at mathworks.com needs 10 minutes to be delivered on mathworks.de.
How about giving mvp,staff, ...??? the facility to lock the Q? while responding and until some reasonable time after the response/edit is posted? If the OP still then decides to delete, well, ok, can't make the horse drink once lead to water, but...
Closing own questions is rarely useful, so I would not miss this feature. But there is obviously a need to delete own questions. This helps to reduce noise and to save the work of the answering members, when no answer is required anymore. I loose about 1 or 2 messages per week by questions closed/deleted during writing an answer. But if the OPs do not have the power to remove their questions, I'd loose much more time by creating answers, which are not needed anymore. I do not see the optimal time point, where deleting an own answer is efficient, fair and useful, so I'd prefer the current policy.
Newcomers use flags often for posting comments and I've spent some time to move them to the comment section in the past. Allowing flags for Rep > 5 would be an improvement in my opinion.
I certainly think that posters shouldn't be allowed to close or delete a question once it has been commented on and even more so if answered. People with low privileges shouldn't be allowed to close questions even if it's their own.
@Cedric, that would be neat idea. Implementation might be quite a pain, so even if it is considered it might take some time. For the reverse we have the mvp, staff, and rising star badges, so it would be nice to also have some indication at a glance if a question is likely to be a waste of time. Sometimes you can look at the name and recognize them for low quality questions, but that doesn't filter the single-hitters.
Chuckles...
Quite often the posts come from those with 0 points and probably 80% only ever appear once or twice.
I'd just like to have things not disappear irregardless while working on it.
Yea well, I'm not sure that I would answer your questions anyway folks ;-)
Back to my initial logic, you have a rep over 100 (=> green) and soon 100k for Walter (and we figured out that the rep won't wrap before max int32 already).
This mechanism would essentially be for evaluating new accounts with no or low rep. The flag could disappear as soon as rep > 100.
Nor I...
I do not use an institutional email address, and I am not in LinkedIn.
It would be neat if accounts had some kind of "trust-ability" colored flags that allow contributors to evaluate the amount of time/effort they are willing to spend without having to investigate too much:
Rep > 100 : green
Rep < 100 :
- red: deleted or edited out thread(s)
- orange: no [Contact] option, unverified identity
- yellow: [Contact] option, unverified identity
- green: verified identity (institutional email address or e.g. cross-check with LinkedIn)
But still, there will be students using their institutional email accounts, posting, and deleting their account once they get an answer ..
I am too impatient to take that much effort/time but in this particular case I did save the code as being useful at some future time.
It would still I think be useful option for editors to have the facility to be able to prevent the nuisance factor--can't control what they do to us later, but at least could wait 'til we're done! :)
I sympathize. This happened to me many times actually (and especially close to mid-term periods I'd say). I ended up printing threads as PDFs before answering (as well as the OP's profile), and emailing the OP if the question was deleted or edited out (with the option to paste back the original content in the latter case). In parallel, I chose not to spend much time answering questions unless the OP had a valid identity or at least an email address with the [Contact] option enabled, and I posted a proposal somewhere for enforcing this option to be enabled.
Yet it seems that it is a no-win situation, because there will always be incivilities that make us loose our time and motivation, and "holding back" our nice answers just in case kills the pleasure of answering.
In cases like that, the site refuses to post but leaves your content in the buffer. I then select the content, Copy, and refresh the page. If the question was only closed instead of deleted, I then reopen, and then post the content. But if it is deleted, then I either shrug and move along or else save the code for later re-use.
Many websites have a mechanism for this already, but Matlab Answers doesn't yet: a soft-close.
Sometimes questions attract 'answers', which are actually the same question repeated over and over. One of the examples is this thread. It would be nice to have a feature that blocks people from posting an answer unless they have some reputation level.
This might be a terrible idea, as people would maybe then just post it as a new question, which would only make the problem worse.
I think the latter is the case with the particular thread, certainly; those folks are basically one of two classes, actually trying/hoping to get/crack a copy or just clueless as to install so if they discover they can't ask for their own key in an existing thread, in all likelihood they'll post a new request.
If it were only up to me, and wanted to take the time, I'd just delete all in that thread except the one or two Answers that explain what to do.
But, it's somewhat futile anyway because others are bound to come along and repeat again, anyway...which is argument to close it so now we've come full circle... :)
On a too-hot summer day I thought I might just try to answer some Q? that hadn't gotten responses...a sort on :unanswered by date showed first ~150 date all the way back to Feb 2011. Is there really any point in keeping anything that has had no response for even 12 months, what more >84???
There are a couple of "Comments" to your question, which in my opinion should have been Answers down in the Answers section, not up in the Comments section.
You could also phrase it the other way around: who's going to mark the valuable questions that don't have a formal answer? The percentage may be low, but there are questions that merit existence. I have a question myself without a formal answer, but I have no intention of deleting it. I don't believe that question needs a formal answer to be handled, and so it goes for many questions. Without having looked through a sample, I think I would agree that there are even more questions that just lack the quality to invite any answer.
Maybe an auto-close/delete would be okay if there aren't even any comments. Off the top of my head I can't think of a question that might add to this website without getting either a comment or an answer.
I'd guess from the several pages I scanned the percentage in that category is quite low...and who's going to find/see them anyway and how?
Sometimes there is a point. Sometimes the question itself contains good information, even if no-one has a solution (or had a solution at the time it was asked.)
Maybe it would be a good idea to ask for a confirmation before allowing users to answer their own question. Many people mistakenly use the answer field, which results in weird threads and a lot of talking about not-the-problem (and maybe a bit of frustration).
I think requiring a few reputation points before being able to answer your own question would be a bit harsh, but it would be alternative.
The main downside to the first option would be that people who don't understand the structure, will probably not read a warning popup.
I'd agree 110%+ with just a button to automagically re-categorize A-->C (and vice versa, sometimes someone writes a comment that is, in fact, a very good Answer) keeping poster ID, etc., ... I've moved quite a number over the years but it's tedious so not nearly as many as coulda'/shoulda' ...
As I've suggested elsewhere, another option is to give editors the ability to move posts between answers and comment and even to promote comments as new questions.
(Answers dev) Thanks for the feedback!
And, I already voted +1, but I'd suggest the "confirmation" be "NO" by default and be specifically worded such as to make clear it's a comment unless and only unless it fully actually answers the question.
I think that's an excellent idea. The number of times people truly answer their own question is like less than a tenth the times where they add an answer that should have really been a comment to someone else's answer.
Not really MATLAB Answers wish, but because the FEX is often mentioned/linked here:
Some notification if an entry uses function declarations that shadow Matlab functions. This is of course also up to the contributor of that code, but if you stick around long enough, eventually Mathworks will create a function with the same name as your code. It would be nice to have an alert yourself (so you don't have to dig through the list of new functions each release), and/or have a warning at the submission itself.
Besides FEX, when a new releases shadows something in user's search path would be most helpful...a recent release introduced isbetween which is one of my utilities of some 20-yr pedigree in my UTILITIES folder which I place at the top of the search path...
I don't know what TMW is going to do eventually to make some way to handle the namespace pollution, but they're going to run out of names at some point themselves unless revert to more and more of the
functionForSomeExoticThingthatalreadyhadsomethingElseNAMEDLIKE_it
nonsense.
Hopefully this is still work in progress, but the options for asking a question are a little odd at the moment. I notice that 'Release' has been added as a field which is great, but it is disabled until you enter a Matlab Product, which itself is not compulsory and is rarely filled in by people. The ability to ask the question is enabled straight away, without tags, product or release so why is release disabled until you enter a product? It just means that one of the most useful pieces of information for a question is very unlikely to be filled in most of the time.
I was reminded of this discussion again today on seeing this question. Most of the time people still simply don't include version information in any form, but when someone here is explicitly adding it into his question text it is surely a clear sign that the method for including this information via the dropdown lists is fundamentally not working.
I really hope this is being strongly considered for redesign because version information is so fundamental it should be in every question and should be so obvious how to do it (or compulsory) when asking a question that even a total newbie to the forum can easily add the information.
To take another very quick sample, 6 months on, at a rough count ~15% of the first 100 questions currently on the first 2 pages of questions have a Product entered that isn't Matlab and 21% include Matlab as the only product. It is maybe better than it was, but still not good for the use case of having to enter the product before it suggests valid releases (given that, as mentioned earlier, every release is valid when the product is just 'Matlab').
Is it worth having "Full Suite" as a separate product when it is at best an obscure name for a campus-wide license (referenced that way only once that I can see) ?.
I see there is also "Standard Suite". It looks to me as if "Standard Suite" and "Full Suite" are the two Student bundles, rather than products.
Thank you everyone!
We appreciate all the great feedback around the release field and will consider these suggestions when we revisit this feature.
But don't throw away the release like you do now. For example if someone said they're using MATLAB R2016b and I decide to add a toolbox to the product list, now the release vanishes! Even if that toolbox existed in that release. So now if I add a toolbox, I have to remember what the release is so I can add it back in. If we moderators forgot the release and just added the toolbox, now the release info is gone. Obviously not a good situation.
Most of the time I can deduce the Product(s) involved based upon the question and function names mentioned. Not always, as there are some products I seldom look at, and also details like which exact SimEvent specialization (such Simscape Multibody) is not always clear.
It is a lot more useful to know the user's MATLAB release.
Instead of filtering release based upon product, filter product based upon release.
(Answers dev)
Thanks again for the feedback.
This is a new feature and we will consider updating it as we continue to get input from the community. Based on your suggestion, we will explore the possibilities of making Product a required field.
With respect to the release drop-down being filtered, we do think this is important as it provides users with a smaller, pre-filtered list that is easier to use.
Thank you again for taking the time to give us feedback on this feature.
What percentage of questions actually include a product though? It seems to me very rare that people bother to include the product (all the more so if we exclude the cases where the product is just 'Matlab', in which case no filtering would happen anyway). For example, as a very small sample, of the 50 questions on the front page as I type this, just 4 include a Product field other than Matlab and another 7 have the Product as Matlab.
Given how useful the information given by the release version is this doesn't seem to be a worthwhile trade-off for 8% of questions (albeit a very small sample, as mentioned!).
Does the release need to be filtered? Surely people will select the correct release anyway if they select it at all (or it could default to the latest, which is presumably valid for all toolboxes).
Either that or force people to include the product too before being able to ask a question would be good.
(Answers dev) Thank you for the feedback. The reason that release is not enabled until a product is selected is because, there are many products that do not exist in certain releases of MATLAB(for instance Text Analytics Toolbox was only introduced in R2017b). Selecting a product or (multiple products) enables us to filter the release drop-down with only the releases that all the selected products exist/existed in. This helps maintain valid combination of products and release for each question.
I've added that request into the enhancement database with a link to this discussion.
Steven, I didn't know about that function. It could be made useful. To be useful it would also have to take Ryear strings. Why can't it? We mostly deal with the Ryear release strings, not the actual numeric version numbers. For example I might know I have R2018a but have no idea if it's version 9.3 or 9.4 or 9.5.1.2 or whatever. Why can't the version input from that verLessThan() function take release strings? Then it might actually be convenient and useful.
if verLessThan('matlab','R2014b') % instead of verLessThan('matlab','8.4')
% -- Code to run in MATLAB R2014a and earlier here --
s2.EraseMode = 'xor';
else
% -- Code to run in MATLAB R2014b and later here --
s2.FaceAlpha = .25;
end
Side note: I created a Question a couple of days ago. The Tag was mandatory.
Image Analyst, I know this is a bit of an aside since the original question dealt with specifying release when asking a question on Answers, but the version number of a product is not necessarily representable as one number. For example, in release R2018a Global Optimization Toolbox has version number 3.4.4. Concatenating the individual digits is not a good alternative, as products with versions 11.1, 1.11, and 1.1.1 would all be represented as 111.
If you want to determine whether the version of a toolbox you have installed is older than the version specified by a version number character array (such as that returned by ver) use the verLessThan function. It knows how to handle version numbers like '3.4.4' or '7.0.1' (as shown in the help text.)
Sorry, I thought you were talking about the MATLAB release in MATLAB, rather than the MATLAB Release when posting a question to the Answers forum.
In the past few days we've talked with the MATLAB Central web developers about the release thing, including my peeve, the existing release number vanishing if I add a toolbox to the product list. Hopefully these are on their to-do list.
I wouldn't have a clue what it meant though if Matlab Answers started showing version as 8.2 and I wouldn't waste my time trying to work out which release that equates to, I'd just ignore it, especially since every toolbox has its own version numbers that are different for a single release.
I use an equally convoluted method:
function v=getVersion
persistent cur_v
if isempty(cur_v)
cur_v=version;cur_v=str2double(cur_v(1:3));
end
v=cur_v;
end
The problem with including a function now, is that you'll have to wrap it in a try-catch block.
I wish the release were available as a number. Currently when we do this
MATLAB_Version = ver
we get this:
If we want the version as a number, to see whether we can run a newer function or not, we have to do this:
MATLAB_Version = ver('MATLAB');
versionNumber = str2double(MATLAB_Version.Version);
if versionNumber > 9.0 % or whatever....
etc.
I'd like to see python-like support for Git/GitHub requirements.txt files.
Python (pip) automatically clones additional repositories included in a GitHub repo's requirements.txt file. This is tremendously useful when working with dependent libraries that are constantly being updated, as opposed to making a clone of the dependent repo as a sub-repo in the main repository.
This seems relatively painless to implement, even in pure MATLAB.
Peter: I made sure this reached the developers who are planning github enhancements.
Seems excessively strict given that the "extra-x" format is now default for all MS Office products; what's the reason isn't allowed--just never added to the "allowed" list, I presume? Just had a Q? wherein the poster ran into the problem; renamed the file but didn't change the format and caused issues because of incompatible format in Excel.
Run into when try to attach any .xlsx file--error box contains following text (I didn't bother to capture image, just the text):
Cannot attach this file because:
File format is unsupported. Use any of these formats: .bmp, .csv, .fig, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg,
.m, .mlx, .mat, .mdl, .pdf, .png, .txt, .xls, .zip
Attach a file:
Choose file.xlsx
(Answers dev) You should be able to attach .xlsx files now.
(Answers dev) Hi dpb, Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
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