[DISCONTINUED] MATLAB Answers Wish-list #4 (and bug reports)
Walter Roberson
on 14 Aug 2015
Latest activity Reply by Walter Roberson
on 30 Jul 2024
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.
372 Comments
Time Descending
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?
(Note: this issue is still occuring as of July 2024)
I have been reporting cases in Teams.
:/ after that thread becomes defunct.
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).
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.
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
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! :)
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.
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