[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.
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.
Why has the Neural Network Toolbox been removed from the list of available products one can select in the Products in the upper right hand side of the Answers pages? Is it no longer a product people can buy anymore?
(Answers dev) My mistake, you should be able to see it in the products lists now.
The name of the product is still Neural Networks Toolbox. It has not been changed or removed. You can find it on the Products and Services page as 'Neural Network Toolbox (for Deep Learning)'.
Not everywhere though. It's still called Neural Network Toolbox in a lot of places on the Mathworks site, like https://www.mathworks.com/products/neural-network.html
One may need a standalone NN app to be able to find... :)
(Answers dev) Congratulations to Kaustubha Govind for reaching 5000 points and receiving the Ace badge!
Congratulations, Kaustubha !
Congratz! :-)
Rep. points should be convertible to bitcoin!
Well let's plan on spending this one by having a tea or coffee if we find an occasion then :-) Next year will be hectic for me, but I am traveling occasionally to Germany, and even sometimes from Stuttgart to Frankfurt (e.g. when there is a snowstorm like in 2010 if I remember well, and I have to take the train because Stuttgart airport is closed ;-))
Humor? Tea? If we meet, I'd be glad to convert one of your reputation points to a coffee, preferably this one: +1. :-)
But then bitcoin should be convertible to reputation points also to reduce the need to answer homework questions.
Excessive use of the forum increases the energy consumption of the servers. Especially valuable answers attract even more users to participate in the forum. Assume, that the reputation is converted to Euro and Dollar already, but charged of from your account automatically to feed the energy debit.
A solution is to provide efficient code, which saves more energy on the user's computer than its publication costs on the server. Then the reputation points are converted to real money - but not inside your pocket, but distributed over the world.
For people who don't check the "Allow users to contact me securely" option in their profile, there could/ should be a button that allows us to send them an automated message "there has been some activity on your thread" (and e.g. a field or drop down for us to enter/select a thread ID).
The rational is that if someone wants time from us, it should be acknowledged/imposed that he/she accepts to receive reminders about open threads or just about added comments. This may help reducing the amount of questions for which the person asking never comes back (if only for saying that he/she doesn't need an answer anymore).
Some option for sending electric shocks remotely would be nice too..
Suggestions:
- when answerer is working on a question and someone else posts a new comment/answer, show a popup before answerer submits a redundant answer/comment "There is a new answer/comment. Look before submitting your answer/comment?" Otherwise, people end up working on an answer, pressing submit, realizing a key answer/comment was given 1 min ago, and then deleting recent post.
- prevent people who ask a lot of questions but provide no feedback that the answers work from posting new questions until previous ones are resolved. Ex: "You've asked 15 questions, received 40 answers, but accepted 0 answers. To ask more questions, please accept answers or close them. If you're not getting correct answers, please read tutorial here on how to ask questions to get answers."
- for new users to this forum, a quick quiz before getting started, since people aren't reading the tutorial. Ex multiple choice: Which is a good question? A. help me? B. what's wrong? C. can you do this for me? D. Why do I get an error when using fopen? I have attached the code and full error message...
It's an interesting one @OCDER
Especially that first one is something I get a lot. I try to reduce the chance of that happening my using a slightly tweaked search and sort when going through the list of unanswered questions.
Thanks for the support. Just saw your detailed answer and felt you, and everyone, should be thanked properly for a LOT of patience :)
+1 / I don't upvote though, otherwise your post goes up in the thread and it becomes more difficult to find ;-)
This is a test Answer to check a potential site problem.
Yup, I was right: the Flagged Content list is malfunctioning for comments and answers.
(Answers dev) This was fixed on 5/10/17.
None of the Flagged Content List links to Answers or Comments are working; they all say page not found.
What's the malfunction? I know that if a flagged post was removed, the entry in Flagged content remains forever. That's been that way for a long time and I think they know about it. Is there something else?
Spacing is interpreted irregularly.
In each of the below, the - are aligned above the +
0 leading spaces before middle, so 1 leading space on first line
- - - -
|+| |+| |+| |+|
- - - -
1 leading space before middle, so 2 leading spaces on first line
- - - -
|+| |+| |+| |+|
- - - -
2 leading spaces before middle, so 3 leading spaces on first line
- - - -
|+| |+| |+| |+|
- - - -
So case of 2 leading spaces on the first line is handled differently and inconsistently from the other cases.
If I recall correctly, the previous discussion on this topic indicated that one leading space on the first line was the special "good" case and that 2 or more leading spaces on the first line were formatted differently; this test suggests a different algorithm.
If you take a section of code that is left aligned and use the {} button then two leading spaces are added, but that is precisely the bad case.
This is tied up to the question of adding code in which the blank-separated lines align properly. The previous discussion hinted that when you have a code structure such as
blah
if this and that
bleh bletch
more bleh
end
then whether the "more" aligns with the "bleh" would depend on whether there were an odd number or even number of leading spaces on the "blah" and "more" lines.
Has anyone else other than me been getting strange symbols that say E6 52 or E630 or similar symbols instead of the little icons that are supposed to show, like these:
I first noticed them this morning on my home computer, and then again at work. Then they went away for most of the day, then they came back at work. And now at home they're here also. Rena suggested I clear my cache but that didn't fix the problem. I was just wondering if anyone else is seeing them too.
Well, I just opened in Chrome instead of Firefox and "they're back!!!" :(
The link/trashcan icons are ok but the edit/delete are empty boxen...
Looks okay with http now, thanks!
(Answers dev) I have just received word that it should now be fixed on http://www.mathworks.com. Please let David Wey know if you see further issues.
Using https:// seems to work for me as well.
This workaround seems to work for me. The icons are back to normal. I just hope that once I go to https, it keeps using that and doesn't switch back to http. So far, so good.
(Answers dev) @Jan :)
@Rena: For me the https pages are fine. Does this mean, that the icons a security problem? ;-)
(Answers dev) A workaround suggested to me is to use https://www.mathworks.com instead of http://www.mathworks.com
(Answers dev) We are looking into this.
I just get little empty squares in place of icons from time to time recently, but not anything with letters in.
I’ve noticed it before today from time to time. It comes and goes randomly and intermittently on Firefox. It only affects the icons, not the text next to them, so it seems to be an aesthetic problem only. Everything else works, so I can live with it.
Still happening to me.
I'm using Firefox. It's back to normal now. It comes and goes, but just started today for me. I don't know why it's intermittent on multiple systems.
I have encountered this on multiple systems. Some brief testing here suggests that it is happening for all of my Firefox browsers, but not for Microsoft Edge, or Safari, or AdBlock Plus Browser (android) . I tested on OS-X and Windows 10 and Android
One idea for MATLAB Central is the ability to follow an author. Currently you can only follow a file but there are some authors for which I'd like to receive a notification if new files are added...
I find the e-mail notifications annoying, so I just check the activity center, but I would think following a contributor would show up there anyway.
This is a very good idea. I currently have a few bookmarks that I check from time to time, but that is very prone to missing stuff.
In addition to file authors, I would like to be able to follow contributors on Matlab Answers, and optionally receive an email every time the chosen person asks/answers/comments.
Not so much a wish, just an oddity I noticed. I set my profile to not allow me to be contactable by e-mail etc and I deselect the option to e-mail me when someone answers my questions so in general I don't get any e-mails from the forum which is as I want it.
Except..when someone unaccepts one of my answers I get sent an e-mail. Of all the things I might want e-mails about if I chose to this really isn't high on the list. I'd rather get an e-mail when someone accepts my answer instead if I really were to want e-mailing when someone makes some response to something I posted!
Long tokens can end up running off the end of the right hand side of the page. For example in http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/246999-probability-1-2-with-matlab-random-number-generators I had reason to quote the number
1.11875110968003101149364479731944007560647073019006103414072774998094175776051774574042623356006417050422674048837541521801190921428379539907292472443881270372218911884781720662428061113996528944121698315475958721481213258908827606800475302345048341134463455488980253230058090875047749429690054193911503277704529859897485122299798376843682490289211273193359375e-154
which goes right off the right hand side.
But we still have the myriad of nested windows with borders and all the useless junk that takes up over half the useful space...don't see they tackled that at all. :(
It appears this has been fixed.
Oh that the rest of the text/code would fill the rest of the line! :(
Especially when I am curating tags, in Answers or in File Exchange, I would like to be able to see a number of items at one time, each of which had a brief "preview" (e.g., the first two or so lines) so that I can more easily ignore the entries that are irrelevant to my then-purpose.
Along with that: when searching in File Exchange, I would like to be able to see the complete list of Tags for the entries, not just 3 or 4 of them. That would save effort of having to visit each entry only to discover that it already has the Tag that I am trying to add consistently.
I have noticed that especially in File Exchange it can take a bit of time after tagging before the tag shows up in the summary (or sometimes even before the tag is considered present for the search.) When I am trying to systematically go through entries, perhaps searching on different terms, then the delay does tend to result in my having to recheck entries.
When I am curating tags like that, it would also be useful for the tags to show up on the pages of the individual source files so I do not have to chase to the root of the File Exchange Contribution to determine whether it is already tagged.
Some days what I would really like is an interface where I could say 'show me a list of the current tags... okay, take all the tags that say "#newton-raphson" and do a bulk change to "newton-raphson". Delete all of the "matlab" tags...'
Speaking of which, I noticed that the characters allowed for tags in File Exchange are different than for Questions, with "-" being automatically removed from the File Exchange tags, leaving "newtonraphson" ??
I have been wondering for a while why it is that in Answers, the tag "steganography" never auto-fills as I type it in? I always have to type it in in full?
(Answers dev) My fault for the confusion, sorry. Top tags on the home page are manually curated to avoid spam. Tags autosuggest, when asking questions, is auto-populated from the 200 most used tags. We are looking into how to improve what goes into the auto-populated list.
For the Home it does not surprise me that the tags are done manually, but for the auto-prompting I would have thought it would be automatic. Or, I guess, at least semi-automatic at every update of the css .
They actually told me that. And the tags on the "Home" screen are also manually entered. They just looked at a distribution of tags and took the top 10. I was asking them about why tags like "MATLAB" and "matlab code" and "matrix" were even on there. I thought it must be automatic, and they said no, they just took a snapshot in time (last October) and manually entered them.
Manually entered? Huh. I always assumed it was just "after a tag has been entered enough times, it becomes automatically suggested". After all, doit4me and related tags autofill, and I would not have expected the staff to have manually entered those into the list.
Possibly because they don't want steganography posts posted there. The predefined tag list was manually entered by the Answers team. I think they're open to discussion on that. I wonder when the "experts" forum is going to open so we can discuss stuff like this there.
I'd like to see the # automatically removed from the first character of tags. After all, this isn't Twitter and we don't use them here.
I have noticed that on multiple days recently, there have been activity on over 300 Questions. I counted 325 one day last week and yesterday I could see that it would have had to be at least 300.
That volume is, I must say, too high for anyone to keep up with, even just to read the material without answering it. I gave up trying to read everything when the volume hit about 150; now I don't even always read everything I have contributed to if I see that one of the other high quality volunteers has responded. I am probably the person who keeps track of more of the discussions than anyone else does, but it takes me many hours per day. A couple of days ago I stopped reading at 5 AM my time caught a bit of sleep, checked again at 9 AM (darn phone calls!), and found that there had been more than 50 new Questions just in that 4 hours.
I am wondering if it is time to create some kind of structured sub-categories to make it easier for people to find and follow what they are interest in without getting swamped with everything else?
Tags go part way towards that... except that most people do not use tags well... and you have to remember not to delete the tag: selection if you want to search within a tag... and tags are not given much prominence in the interface.
I am not at all certain how best to proceed. But one idea: if a user had selected a Category (that might be implemented as a tag) and then Asked a question, then the tag for that category could be automatically filled in (the user would be allowed to remove it), so that the question would default into being part of the category too.
Actually that might work, re-branding tags as Category, auto-fill the tags according to the Category the user currently has selected, and give a more prominent interface for the user to select Category and to "refine".
Background: The threads of comments, in which I participate, are not always effective. One reason (certainly not the main one) is that it's difficult to refer to a comment, which is a less than 24 hours old. And it's so tedious to be referred to "my comment above".
It's possible to refer to "per isakson on 13 Apr 2016 at 20:40", but not to "per isakson about 17 hours ago", since it isn't static.
Proposal: Add some kind of sequence number in the heading of each comment. It's short and easy to write and read.
(Answers dev) I'm guessing restarting firefox cleared your cache. Enjoy!
Very nice addition. Thank you. By the way, it didn't work at first but started working after I restarted Firefox. Maybe you upgraded it after I had already launched Firefox. Who knows, but at least it's working now and it will be helpful.
(Answers dev) A copy to clipboard button has been released for the link popup. The Safari browser does not support copy to clipboard yet. Their next version of the browser is supposed to add support and then we will add the button for safari.
Hah yes! I have had to had two copies of the same Question open sometimes! If there is long code, or code spread out over multiple Answers and Comments, then it can be necessary to be positioned for reading in one place while being positioned for writing in a different place.
In this answer and the comment I argue for a simple way to make references to answers an comments. (This text is hard to read, since it's cluttered by the links. That's okay as long as I don't need to scroll to see the preview.)
Insert link: find source; right click; copy link; scroll back to edit box; paste; and come up with a comprehensible "tag" (e.g Walter's comment). To those involved in the discussion the "tag" should be enough without following the link.
Follow link when edit box is open: scroll to find text with link; right click link; open in new tab; read; return to tab with open edit box.
Next time I get involved in a never-ending thread with a student writing a thesis based on weather/climate data, I will try to have the thread open in two tabs, for writing and reading, respectively. (That type of use case might not be frequent.)
I've suggested to Rena that, after you click the chain link icon and it brings up the link URL, to have a button to let you copy the link into the clipboard. This is how http://snag.gy/ does it when you paste in a picture. The present way of trying to click and drag over the URL is unreliable unless you start the click in exactly the right place, and the right click method, while it works, is hidden and non-intuitive. Having a simple button there to copy the URL to the clipboard is, in my opinion, the best way.
Drag the link instead of left-clicking on it. Or right-click on it and choose the menu entry to copy the link. Or, it the case of the chain symbols, even if you are entering text, clicking on the chain will give you a pop-up that you can copy; it will not navigate you away unless you click on what is popped up.
A bit of experimenting with links convinced me to hold on to my proposal: Add some kind of sequence number in the heading of each comment.
In a thread of comments the goalposts are often moved, thus references are useful to avoid misunderstandings.
Links cannot be used when writing, since one is asked Leave page? when trying to use a link.
Links are fine when reading a thread with no editbox open for writing.
Hey, it worked! Thanks, Rena!
(Answers developer) Walter, You should be able to navigate to hidden comments now via a comment link. I fixed this a little while back but didn't announce it (sorry!). Are you still experiencing this problem?
Remember, the times shown are local to the server, and no time zone is displayed. If you refer by time you would need UTC or the like.
Comments can be linked by dragging their chain or "copy link" on the chain, or click on the chain and copy the link.
I find it more of a problem that when a comment is linked, if the comment is not one of the 3 most recent, that clicking on the link just gets you to the overall page, not even to the "click to see older" link.
With respect to each Comment, the absolute times would definitely be helpful, for the reasons per listed.
With respect to the way Latest Activity is listed on the Answers main page for each thread and at the top of each post, the elapsed time rather than the absolute time (that is, leaving it as it is now) would be preferable to me.
And of course now that we can click directly on either ‘Answered’, ‘Commented’, or ‘Edited’ on the Answers main page and at the top of a thread and go directly to that post eliminates the problem of finding the latest activity in the thread. (Thank you, belatedly!)
its too hard to dissect examples and learn their variables
also Floating Bar Plot Graph should be added to the "Create & connect a viewer >DSP"
I believe you posted about that in the What Frustrates You thread. This present Question is about the Answers system itself (the forum software), not about MATLAB.
For new users, it might help to force askers to answer yes to these questions before their question can be posted:
- Did you describe your problem in detail? {{Include a help bubble that error messages should be included in the question, etc.}}
- Have you provided a minimal working example? {{Include a help bubble describing an MWE for those who are unfamiliar with the concept.}}
- Have you formatted your code for readability? {{Include a help bubble describing how to format code.}}
I don't think it would be necessary to make askers say yes to these questions forever, but it may get rules of etiquette and effectiveness into their heads if they have to think about their questions the first few times posting on the forum.
As of last day (or perhaps two?) every reply Answer/Comment elicits the "Leave Page?" popup even when have SUBMITted the response.
ditto...not fatal but initially would raise concern hadn't saved. Since learned it is just a bug that 'Cancel' isn't clearing the flag to hit the 'Remind' path on exit.
I see that as well, on Firefox, especially if I first compose as a Comment on a Question, grab the text and cancel the Comment and paste to become an Answer and submit. When I go to leave the page afterwards it typically asks me whether I am sure I want to leave the page.
I have this (with Chrome on Windows 10) when I cancel editing a comment and submit it as an answer instead. Not really a problem, but still noticeable.
Ah...indeed,thanks, IA. BTW, it does not need a restart it seems...went away here w/ only the clear (Firefox)
I noticed that too and Rena said it was a cache problem. I cleared my Cache (History->Clear Recent History->Cache in Firefox), and restarted (just to be sure) and the problem went away.
I just noticed a minor feature.
Searching for   classdef -tag:oop   returned 361 hits, which is reasonable. However, restricting the search to   MATLAB   returned 27833 hits. Or I missed the intentended behaviour.
(Answers dev) This has been fixed.
The behavior you’ve identified isn’t a feature and we (MathWorks) are actively working on a solution. We’ll reply back to this thread when we release a fix. Thank you for helping to improve MATLAB Answers. (Answers Developer)
Far too often the original poster posts a new "Answer" to a question posed by someone in a Answer or Comment, instead of replying to that specific Answer or Comment where the question was posed. I suggest that the "Answer this question" caption be changed to mention the original poster, like "Answer the original question by Walter Roberson". Hopefully that will lessen the number of times people answer their own question when they should be replying to someone else.
I'd also like to see "Comment" be changed to "Reply" to be consistent with the wording used in almost all other online forums.
A few days ago, sometime this calendar year, there was a Question about getting the File Exchange contribution mp3write to work in newer versions of MATLAB. I answered, and then later had to explain the answer further.
Now just after the January 13 2016 upgrade, the Question is gone, cannot be found by searching. Google cannot find it either, so it did not necessarily vanish today.
Keywords from the discussion included mp3write, wavwrite, audiowrite, and "lame" (the name of an external program that mp3write invokes to convert a temporary .wav file into mp3)
(Answers Dev) This issue has been resolved.
A few days ago I replied to http://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/profile/authors/7367265-solai-rajs about reading mha files. Now the search engine cannot find any reference to mha since 2013 (except one I just made a moment ago.) Google cannot find my response either. My first request to look at that author's questions showed only their most recent question, but just now as I went back I was able to find their previous work and tracked down the unsearchable question as being http://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/263090-need-a-dataset-for-brain-tumor-images
You can post a reference to the "cursive" tag by referring to
But if you change the "www" to "uk" then the reference will be considered to be potential spam. The same thing does not happen for the tag "ocr" for example,
I generated the tag reference by dragging from the Tags section of a post into a Comment while I am connected to the uk Answers server (there was a period when it was more reliable and faster than the US server so the UK one is the one I bookmarked.)
It looks like tags that are dragged are now automatically generated with the main site instead of localized.
I was able to add a Comment, but not an Answer. I tried multiple times; each attempt timed out. Short answers had the same problem as long. Trying the uk mathworks site had the same problem.
(MATLAB Answers Developer)
Thank you all for your valued feedback. We continue to monitor the wish lists and have incorporated the following projects into our development plan:
- Ability to follow question threads and contributors
- Enhancements to notifications
- Unaccept/multiple answer acceptance
- Improvements to the text editor
- Less whitespace in Answers
We will you update you when each feature is closer to release. In the meantime, please continue to post new ideas, enhancements, and problems within this thread.
Thank you!
KAE:
Under "My MATLAB Answers", there is a "My Questions", which shows you the recent activity on questions you have asked. There is also "My Comments", to see the activity on questions you have commented on (as I recall, you have made some contributions to other people.)
And I would love to not get e-mails when someone unaccepts my answer. I switched off e-mail notifications, yet these somehow get through the net and are totally irrelevant to me!
I would like an email notification when comments are added to my question, and not just when answers are added. The comments are often asking for clarifications which people need to answer my question, and if I'm not notified about the comments, the question just sits there until I remember to check it.
I would personally like some control over notifications, just as is possible in the FEX. These do not have to be e-mails, but can also be in-site notifications.
Now I have to go to "My answers" and "My comments" separately and see if the last activity is from a later date than my last visit.
(Answers dev) We released the answer unacceptance feature on 4/13/2016. Questioners may now unaccept answers. Other users with 500+ reputation may unaccept answers after 7 days. Please note that no points are removed from the answerer's reputation via unacceptance.
Rena, Thanks for keeping us hoping good things are still coming! :) While grok it's not possible to let the cat out of the bag, at least an occasional acknowledgement of the duck is paddling under the surface goes a long ways towards relieving pent-up frustration that otherwise tends to build....
(Answers dev) Glad you are enjoying the edited by links :) We’re working on the spacing issues.
(Answers dev) The missing questions issue has been taken care of.
Agree on the notification -- think it should also be apparent on each page and not just the front page as I never go there; only to my Answers/Comments to see if anything has happened should respond to and then I have link to a sort by unanswered that I glance over the first page of to see if anything tickles my fancy. Other than that, I don't see it...
@Star Strider, @Image Analyst : I just found we had an outdated email list. We'll fix it.
Thanks for the idea about notification. It would be part of our Notifications project. Please continue to share your ideas about the new release within this thread. Thank you!
I completely agree.
Tell EVERYONE who uses Answers about a scheduled shutdown, not just a selected subset of Editors.
I don't remember seeing any email in either of my two accounts either. I think a yellow banner across the top for at least 8 hours prior announcing any planned shutdown would be better.
I didn’t get any email in either my primary account that TMW has as my primary email, or my ‘gmail’ account (linked to my File Exchange profile). I must not have made the cut.
When I clicked on a profile of someone who had submitted a Question, it said the person had asked 4 questions but the search for them said they had not added any. This suggests that there are problems with updating the activity information that are worse than just waiting for old ordering to be flushed by new activity. (Besides, even if it was that, a glitch as of today's content, then unless it is fixed then every time in the future that anyone looked back to today or further, wrong content would be shown...)
Chen Ling sent out an announcement to Answers Editors about noon Eastern time for a roughly 5 pm Eastern downtime.
I notice the spam test is still overly sensitive; Rena's response above was caught in Possible Spam limbo until I noticed it.
I noticed that the posts were ‘shuffled’ as well. New ones were showing up correctly, so this may work itself out in time. (My own Profile page Answers are all intact and correctly ordered, so I am relying on OPs to check their own Profile pages rather than the main Answers page.)
I was also in the middle of writing an Answer, and only discovered the shutdown when I went to ‘Submit’ it and could not. My first thought was to check the Answers page to be sure it hadn’t been deleted by the OP. That’s when I discovered the shutdown. (The Question I was Answering wasn’t deleted, and I successfully submitted it a couple hours after I wrote it, when the site came back up.)
It would be extremely helpful to have several hours notice of ‘Planned Maintenance’ shutdowns. I refresh the Answers page fairly often during the day, and would notice a banner warning of a scheduled shutdown.
The ordering by recently updated is messed up; I reported this to answers-editors a short time after the system came back after the upgrade. The Recent Activity list appears to have been updated okay. I do not know anything about whether Questions themselves disappeared; you would need to know the question number to check.
Well, not completely satisfied here. I was answering a question when, around 5:15 today you took the site down for planned maintenance. Thanks to Lazarus I recovered my message and mailed it to to myself at home. Now that Answers is back online, the message I was answering is not there. In fact a lot are missing. It goes from 10 hours ago to 15 hours ago in the responses. Now I know there were a bunch of responses during that time-- that was morning on a Wednesday, a busy time. In fact here is one I answered earlier today and doesn't show up on the complete list at the 5 hours ago slot. I got this from a list of my answered questions. There are 4 others on that list that I answered during that time and they are nowhere to be found on the main "complete" list. Why not?
Have great satisfaction anyway!
I only noticed it with your edit to this thread when I saw ‘Edited’ in blue, and mousing over it showed it to be a hyperlink. So, of course, I clicked on it...
Star Strider You beat me to it :) I was going to have great satisfaction announcing this tomorrow. Enjoy!
@Rena — Appreciate the new active link to ‘Edited by’!
Thanks!
The difficulty of the web format and the "Latest Activity" is that unlike a newsreader that keeps track of what is Read/Unread for each user in their client and lets them follow a thread of interest by skipping from one unread response subthread to the next, all that a user here sees is the last activity on a thread and all kinds of stuff may have gone on unbeknownst to them since their last foray.
It's either ignore that or one has to reread each thread essentially in toto every time there's any activity to see what else went on in the meantime.
And the irony is with your last Edit, now this thread itself is subject to the bug... :) (at least until I submit this comment!)
(Answers Developer) I misunderstood. The update fixed all of the answered by, commented on, etc for in page edits (ex: submitting a comment or answer). The "Edited by" links were not touched. I will submit a bug fix request to get the "Edited by" links to point to what was edited. Sorry for the confusion.
That's a big ditto here, too, Star. I see no changes in any view I ever look at that the "Edited by" isn't ever an active link so lose the direct access to anything except the question itself until somebody else adds a new comment...I also am on Firefox if it matters (but it shouldn't; coding should be browser-neutral).
I’m not seeing ‘Edited by’ as an active link on the ‘Answers’ page link in this post or when I opened the thread itself, for example, so I had to search through the thread to see Rena Berman’s latest edited comment. (I’m using the latest version of Firefox, but I doubt if the browser matters.)
dbp, the behavior of the latest activity links for in page updates should have been fixed as of 11/11/2015. Please let me know if you are still seeing this behavior.
@Walter — If the ‘Unaccept’ option is enabled I would continue to credit 4 points permanently for any answer that is Accepted, even if the OP later Unaccepts it. Accepting other answers would be open to the OP immediately, and to others with appropriate privileges, just as Answering is now.
Yeah, I was just restricting to within the list published--don't know why yours above and mine of the "Edited by" not being an active link as is "Answered" or "Commented" are to get to the lastest activity in a thread didn't even make the list...hopefully because they are so trivial it wasn't thought necessary to list them, maybe??? Hope, hope, hope...
The biggest annoyance for me (because it affects nearly every post I open), and I know Rena knows about it so hopefully they'll get to it soon, is the scrolling bug. Where when you click on the "Answered by" link, the part of the thread you wanted to see is scrolled above the viewport so you have to scroll up to see it. Number two would be having to click two buttons to attach a file instead of just one (this is why at least half of posts don't have the attachment the author thought they attached).
I'm just thrilled that TMW is actually looking at some of the more exasperating issues; this one is minor nicety that would rank about next-to-last in my list of which are the important things to attack first. In order as they're listed, I'd go--
3 5 4 2 1
altho 1 and 2 (the editor for attacking all the code listing issues and the white space should go together as "the big red one".
Every once in a while, someone accidentally Accepts an answer they did not mean to accept; there is a need for someone to be able to reverse that in a timely manner.
I guess the thought is if somebody adds another later and think it's the winner but I wouldn't argue w/ not having the facility either.
I discourage an Unaccept option, and welcome the Multiple Accept option.
I would add a large down arrow to ‘Accept this answer’ to make it more obvious the answer the person is accepting. That may be the most common reason people apologise for accepting the wrong answer. An alternative would be to put ‘Accept this answer’ to the left side of the answer (with a right arrow).
I admit, that I have problems to understand the meaning of the new landing page. I'm simply confused by the offered information. Therefore I assume, that this page does not support newcomers to improve the handling of the forum.
E.g. I see a list of "popular tags", which contains the terms "matlab", "matlab code" and "error". To improve the usage of the forum it would be much better to mention, that these terms are useless for the purpose of the tags.
Newcomers are still not instructed to use code formatting. In consequence the high reputations users spend time for editing questions and post instructions. This is a waste of power. Mentioning the FAQ on the landing page would be a shortcut also.
I do not think, that new users need to recognize users with a high reputation. They will recognize a valid answer, even if it was posted by another newcomer.
@Walter: Over 6800 times users recognized your answers as valid and useful. I'm convinced, that they did so, because of the validity of your answers, and not due to the estimation of the other 6799 accepted answers.
Thanks, Jan Simon. The new landing page will get better with great thoughts from power users like you. To your code formatting point, I'm thinking if we can also have this mentoring on the "ask a question' page.
I have had difficulty with new users not recognizing valid answers. New users tend to "know" that they are right, and that we are "hiding" the real answer from them, or that we are ignorant and do not know the real answer, or that obviously the fact their code does not work is a bug in MATLAB that will be fixed and a new release issued in 10 minutes. Convincing new users that MATLAB is right (or self-consistent) and their understanding is at fault is not always easy.
I would like power-users to have the ability to conditionally accept an Answer during the initial 7-day wait period. There have been many occasions when a Question gets answered and it is obviously worthy of accepting. The original poster may not acknowledge it, or may simply provide a comment of thanks without formally accepting it. Rather than waiting the 7 days and then spending additional time coming back to the Question to accept the answer (if it hasn't been already), I would like to have the ability to click on some type of conditional acceptance button immediately. If no additional answers are subsequently posted and no answer has been accepted then when the 7 days expires the conditional acceptance would turn into a formal acceptance automatically. If additional answers do get subsequently posted then the conditional acceptance could be automatically deleted (maybe with an e-mail notification to the power-user to re-visit the Question).
Walter is right. The traffic is cyclical. But if we trail 4 quarters(T4Q), we actually see a significant increase each quarter.
Not knowing where to look is a real thing. MATLAB is not a small language
Afterthought — It seems that a large number of ‘Questions’ of late could easily be resolved by the four-letter quasi-expletive used years ago (and still used in the gaming community): RTFM! = Read The (Friendly) Manual!
I should have clarified my observation about traffic. The volume may have increased, but the character of the Questions seems to have shifted toward less substantive — or less frequently substantive — content, as Walter noted.
I go back through the last two or three pages every morning (covering the previous 12 hours or so), looking for Questions of interest to me and for those that have not been Answered. I keep up occasionally during the day, and check my Profile page to see if any follow-ups are needed.
There is a lot of student traffic, so traffic is partly cyclical based upon the typical school year. We should expect it to rise again in the next few weeks as assignments become due near the end of the late 2015 term.
My experience is that the overall traffic is rising. Over 200 questions a day is not unusual now. Those who choose to specialize in what they answer can do searches (but might miss something of interest to them), but the more generalist among us would tend to get overwhelmed . I know when I get overwhelmed here, I tend to stop trying to even read everything and tend to instead skip around and only check out and answer whatever might at first glance look interesting, in a much lower volume.
Just like how in Google searches most people don't read past the first page of results, I suspect that a lot of the volunteers do not read past the first page or two of "Most Recent". It gets to be too much.
I often answer questions before bed (and if I can't sleep, get up and answer more.) It is not uncommon that by the time I wander off, about 2/3 of the first "Most Recent" page are questions I have contributed to. When I wander back in the morning, 5-ish hours later, it is common that only about 3 of the first "Most Recent" page are questions I have worked on, reflecting updates from other people. It would probably be normal for most of the volunteers to see a completely different set of questions on the first page every time they visit.
As the number of students using the facility increases and as courses tend to teach much the same thing, the ratio of "interesting" questions for those with expertise in other areas will tend to decrease even if the absolute number of questions they might be interested in increases. Even if the distribution is like a sum of a few normal distributions (i.e., multimodal), when traffic doubles, for specialists it might go from "finding a needle in a haystack" to "finding two needles in a haystack twice as big."
One thing that I do find is that as traffic increases, so does the number of people who say "Give me code that implements this obscure paper!". I've got the "My Term Project Is Due On Tuesday" Blues. It is discouraging.
I am Closing an increasing number of questions on the grounds of No Question Was Asked. It seems a bit harsh sometimes, but with there being as much traffic as there is, the volunteers don't survive long without some Boundary Setting.
I do not have solutions here, but I think we are seeing burn-out, together with the more selective volunteers having difficulty finding questions of interest to them due to the volume.
Maybe users (or non-users) could just be hidden from the list if they went longer than 3 years without logging in, but their points remembered, so that the rest of us wouldn't see them. However if they logged in again, they could "renew" their points for another 3 years, and of course, they and all the rest of us would see them again. Just throwing out an idea to encourage newer users to "climb the list" and see their progress, while long-inactive users could still retain their spot on the list should they ever decide to participate in the community again.
I agree with Image Analyst on the first paragraph of his latest Comment, but not on the second. Reputation earned should be reputation kept. People here have lives, and with their lives, have other interests and obligations. (For example, Matt Fig, who also authored several useful File Exchange contributions, is according the the ‘Contributors’ page, off earning his Ph.D. at one of the finest engineering schools in the U.S. I would not penalise his Reputation status for that, since he may return when his time permits.) Also, it seems that traffic on Answers has decreased in the past few months, so some may find fewer Questions, or a lower frequency of Questions, in their areas of expertise. We all have our particular areas of interest. I suspect people show up here when their time and motivation permits.
One certain way to discourage people from contributing would be to put a time filter on Reputation points. One certain way to keep talented people contributing would be to demonstrate that their efforts — even if their participation is sporadic — is rewarded with privileges appropriate to their permanent Reputation.
Sometimes users want to accept multiple answers but they are limited by whatever one they happened to click on first. How about if they click any "Accept" link that a popup box comes up with a prompt that asks "Which answer(s) solved your question?" or "Which answer best solved your question?" or "Which answer did you use?" and have checkboxes with the Answerers names and they can select one or more of those?
Also, some past power users seem to have drifted away. For example, look at some of the flat lines here and here. It might be good to reward people for being active by either computing reputation based on only the last 2 or 3 years, or else have some kind of weighting system where old answers are increasingly weighted less than more recent answers. That way new poser users could see their names rise to the top of the list faster and people who don't use it anymore would eventually drop off the list, and probably don't care if their name is on the list, and perhaps don't even deserve to be on the list anyway.
Low "accepted rate" is a big concern for us. Nice to hear discussions on this topic. I like both ideas. James' approach automates the acceptance process, while Star Strider's approach leverages existing workflow. Hope other power users can share more thoughts.
Having more than one accepted Answer seems to be a neat idea. I think it's also beneficial to other members. Visitors tend to read ONLY accepted answer but other answers might also be very valuable. I would suggest we limit the maximum number of accepted answers (2,perhaps).
Here are some other ideas we got from power users and our team.
- The landing page would be a good place to draw newcomers' awareness to accept an answer.
- Notify OP to accept best answers by email
- Give Points to OP for accepting best answer as well as other activities such as comment or vote (should be a new point system, a little off-topic?)
An alternative would be a ‘Conditional Acceptance’ flag, so that a Comment such as ‘Thank you very much! That completely solved my problem!’ would be flagged, then those with the appropriate privilege level could check the ‘Flagged Content’ and Accept any Answers with that flag after the seven-day embargo.
The problem would be in the frequent event of similar or overlapping but not identical Answers that were posted at about the same time, or two distinctly different Answers, that due to an ambiguity in the Question, would both seem to be equally ‘Acceptable’. It might be necessary to be able to Accept more than one of the appropriate Answers.
I believe that it should be possible for the OP to Accept more than one Answer, if the OP wants to. That could lead to more Accepted Answers, because it would not force the OP to decide between two or more equally Acceptable Answers, especially if the OP Accepted the ‘wrong’ Answer initially.
This seems to have been something that changed in the last few days. Why has the 'Home' link on Matlab Answers suddenly changed to take me to a page I find useless?
For the last year I have been here I have clicked on 'Home' as my standard way of returning to the full unfiltered list of all questions. I browse this sometimes to answer one and sometimes because the question is of interest and I want to read someone's answer.
Now this link takes me to a page where I have to click to 'Ask a Question', 'Answer a Question', read 'Top Questions' or 'Try Answering These'. This is very annoying.
It does at least seem that when I clock 'Go' next to 'Answer a Question' that this does now take me to the unfiltered list (yesterday it was taking me to a filtered list of only unanswered questions), but I'd still prefer that 'Home' takes me to the Matlab Answers page of all questions as it intuitively should.
(Answers dev) The new "Browse" link in the subnav menu works to take you to the old home page without filters on.
Sometimes I see the backward compatibility of Matlab very critically, e.g. when base functions as fopen or strncmp change their behavior without a hint in the release notes. Getting a free Matlab license will have an influence on my mind, or at least on the way I express myself in the public forum.
In opposite to gifts, which mean a big finanviel advantage, I'd appreciate the oportunity to contact the developers directly.
Hi Walter, thanks for the great thoughts. I would also vote if I could. :) Your feedback are very valuable for us to design our long term strategy and prioritize winning moves. I'll bring them to the community team. Power users will hear from us in next few weeks.
Thanks again!
@Walter — I’d vote for your most recent Comment if I could.
2. I certainly support your criteria for free licenses. Renewing is getting to be a significant financial crunch every Spring.
3. Being #5 at this point, I’m thankfully over the horizon. Only #1-#4 are displayed on the Home page I see.
5. I ‘hide’ my contact information in my File Exchange profile, because I want to know if any of my File Exchange contributions have problems. (I am not really interested in random emails from many too-easily-frustrated Answers posters.) By my criteria, anyone from ‘Answers’ who is energetic, ingenious, and motivated enough to think to track me through my File Exchange profile deserves some sort of a reply!
+42 :)
(particularly on the last point; I hadn't looked at the new landing page before; I'm not all that sure either that's the right kind of "recognition".
Chen Lin:
With regards to recognition for power users:
- it is nice to see Mathworks recognizing us. But I can think of other forms of recognition that might be more appreciated. For example: bling; free licenses (or at least free SMS renewal); better (heck, some) communications with the developers; some communications with Sales (since we end up being the people who have to talk about rights on multiple computers and transfer rights and "Why" something is allowed or not); a mechanism for us to be able to point to a topic and say "Ummm, this is really getting to be a long term problem, please have someone address it publicly". People come here angry or worried and we as volunteers have to resort to "Don't ask us, we're just mushrooms here."
- If you need a standard for the free licenses then you could for example say that "Each 3000 reputation (full editor privileges equivalent) earned is worth a license renewal; I count 10 non-Mathworks who have reached that level once, 2 twice that, 1 triple, 2 quads, 1 octuple, and 1 duodecal. Adjust the level requirements as needed if that is too many.
- With regards to new people "recognizing" us, one factor is just for the new people to understand that they are probably getting a pretty solid answer that they should take seriously. But there are alternate mechanisms for that, such as adding an icon after the names of the people with strong reputations. For example it might be granted with 1500 on up. I don't know, a gold star icon perhaps, but I'm sure you could come up with something more thematic
- If you are going to "recognize" us on the landing page, please rotate it a bit so that it isn't always the same three of us. 1+floor(abs(randn*50)) perhaps.
- Following I guess I can live with. But one form of recognition that I do not need is even more students sending me personal messages expecting me to do their major assignment for them. And I worry that will happen even more if I'm right there on the main page all the time.
Hi Image Analyst, there is a fix currently in test for the bug you mentioned. It is supposed to be in our next release. We started working on that in July but it's not a simple fix. Thanks for your understanding.To dpb, thanks again for your great feedback.
What would be of benefit possibly would be a composite FAQ of more extensive content than the present that could be referred to by the frequent responders more readily as links. Walter pointed out he's saved a personal library of his answers in his local bookmark file; if there were a way to make general use of that kind of tool so that could be viewed and referred to by others and be a compendium of "the best of Forum". As is, I've been too lazy and so go look up #3A at the FAQ multiple times but quite often I simply ignore the question rather than bother as it's not handy. And, yea, some of that is my fault for not having Walter's discipline, but if it were more integrated into the Forum it might have a chance to be of some actual use for the intended purpose.
"...is to reduce power users’ workload by educating new users and cutting down duplicate questions"
I have commented on this at some length in one of the early discussions regarding the introduction of the Forum instead of continuing with cs-sm as being a mostly futile dream. The short version boils down to two points--newbies and inexperienced users up to a fairly significant competence level
- simply don't recognize the posted answer as being the response to their question in a very high fraction of cases because it's not identical to the way they see it or the variables are different or a myriad of other immaterial details that for them "hide the forest for the trees", or
- they tend not to take the time out to do extensive searching first, anyway; they're intent on an answer to a question Now! whether they preface the query w/ "Urgent!" or whatever or no...
Both of those are generalizations, of course, and there are certainly some users for which they aren't true but I'd venture it describes a high fraction of the new/newer users you describe as targets above.
I don't know if can find the previous remarks easily or not; there are some other issues I see with the concept that basically limit the possiblity of it ever really fulfilling the initial concept of being a more reusable database and not, in essence, a parallel usenet group. I don't disagree it's a noble concept, just don't think it's possible w/o much more organized oversight/moderation to basically normalize remaining database entries, particularly in areas of rigor re: tags, formatting and content of titles, etc.
imo, $0.02, ymmv, etc., etc., etc., ...
Well, since you seem to be relatively new to the forum, I'll recast my thought again that imo for the power user there ought to be a format that looks very much like a regular newsgroup with navigation thru a series of threads directly w/o having to page back and forth one at a time.
It would be ideal if the forum feed could be cast into nntp protocol so a regular newsreader could be used to make straight edits and answer questions, etc., with a news client but that's likely not feasible. It would be a goal to produce a similar interface, however.
Hi, I apologize for the inconvenience. One of the goals of this new landing page is to reduce power users’ workload by educating new users and cutting down duplicate questions. Another goal is to provide recognition to power users. That's why we list top contributors on new landing page. Also new users can follow you in future. However, we overlooked that power users do come to the complete list very often. We are organizing meetings to discuss the solutions and, more importantly,improved process to avoid similar incidents. I’ll get back to you once we have results.
Thanks for all the great feedback and we really appreciate your contributions to our community.
Well, as of the last few minutes, the saved link to "unanswered" I've used to get to the list needing answers responds w/ 404. I'm not wasting time going thru the whole front page every time so unless and until it comes back I guess I'll be limiting my support to cs-sm.
I've probably been the most vocal about the forum interface being too frilly as opposed to functional, but this is just absurd now that the ones who support the requestors the most are the most penalized in making their pro bono work even more difficult and costly to them.
ADDENDUM That symptom seems, perhaps, to have been a function of the server rather than solid; didn't last over a few hours. I still hold to the follow-on thought re: power users being unduly taken advantage of their generosity by TMW.
Good to hear a response.
I can accept 'Home' changing and anything that might guide a new user to asking questions more easily, but there must be room in amongst the links at the top to just add a new link that takes us back to the old home page.
I am getting used to using my bookmark now, but it's not the most convenient method to navigate around what is really a single site to have to keep clicking my bookmarks.
I'm not sure what such an option would be named, but if it simply exists I don't really care what it is named!
Chen, besides not fixing the old bugs (like the wrongly scrolled bug which is most annoying), the new design has made it less convenient for power users. So I used to be able to click Home and see all the posts in the Answers forum. Now Home doesn't do that, and that's fine - I can get used to it. I found I could do "Answer a Question" to get the complete list - well at least for a few days it did, but now it seems that when you click that, it filters it by returning only questions that have no answers at all. So, how do I see the complete list now? It seems the only way is to click "Answer a Question" and then click the X to remove the "unanswered" tag. There doesn't seem to be any other way (that I've found out about, other than setting a bookmark) for a user to go directly and immediately to the complete list (the "Recently Added" list). What is the expected process that a user is supposed to do to get to that? Because now it seems kind of roundabout and non-intuitive.
Thanks for all the great feedback. I’m the new Community Product Marketing Manager, and appreciate your insight into new features and designs. Hoping I can shed more light on the “why” behind the new landing page.
The new landing page is designed to orient new and casual users to Answers. Historically, we saw a very high abandonment rate by newer users clicking on the “home” button. When we examined other Q&A forums in the industry, it appeared that other websites were friendly in introducing the forum, and welcoming new visitors. The page was designed with this goal in mind.
We’re hoping the question autosuggest feature will also cut down on duplicate questions and that the ‘Get Started’ tips will help novice users ask better questions.
The URL for past home page did not and will not change; we did this so any bookmarks and workflows would remain intact.
Thanks again for your thoughts. We plan to add some features in future releases that we think will be of interest to you. Please continue to share, either publicly or my messaging me directly.
Chen Lin
Good idea to mark the FAQ's, etc., ... I've been too lazy on the front end but should.
I use firefox. I drag the URLs of my most commonly accessed pages into the toolbar, so I can reach them with a single click. I go into the Bookmarks menu, find the Bookmarks Toolbar section, find the appropriate URL, edit the Name section to make it something short. For example I have
UK Tag FAQ up mark Ask floop
where the first takes me to the UK Answers page, the second to the Guide to Tags, the third to the FAQ, the next to the Answer about formatting with markup, the next to the Answer about how to ask a good question, the next to the FAQ about looping over files, and so on. The UK one I click on to start my session; the other ones I drag into an Answer or Comment to copy in the appropriate link.
IMO it was broke, just "less broke"... :) (or :( more realistically, I guess).
I certainly agree that ‘Answers’ now is definitely worse than it was a year ago, before TMW started ‘improving’ it. I don’t understand the reason for all the changes. It wasn’t ‘broken’, so no ‘fixes’ were necessary.
The problem is that is just answers I have given. I use those links a lot to keep track of any replies to questions I have given an answer to or commented on, but to do something as simple as go to the full unfiltered list of questions it seems there is now no single-click link other than our own bookmarks.
The 'Answer a Question' link at the top is one that filters to only unanswered ones so that is probably what I was clicking yesterday when I ended up there too.
From ‘Home’, in the upper left, click on ‘My MATLAB Answers’, then right-click on ‘My Answers’ then ‘Open Link in New Tab’ to create a new tab with all your Answers in the ‘old’ format. Then bookmark that.
Yeah, I do have the main page bookmarked so that does still work, I guess I just have to get used to going to my bookmarks instead of 'Home' now.
There was an update within the last couple of days designed to make it easier for new users to find information.
If you go directly to the old location (such as by bookmark) then you will continue to have the same interface as before. The location is http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers or as appropriate for your country. The new interface has a /index on the end of that.
If there is a Question, and the Question has a Comment which has attachments, then when the Question is edited, the page that is painted upon Submit does not have the attachments to the Comment. The attachments are still there, but the page needs to be repainted to see them.
Currently tabs in input show up as nice whitespace for unformatted sections, but put in no space at all for formatted sections. I do not know how people are getting the tabs generated in the first place, but they most frequently show up in vectors or arrays of numbers. Typically in code that the user didn't {} Code . So the innocent volunteers come along, highlight the code, format it, save... and then have to go back and manually change the tabs to spaces because the code is now unreadable :(
URLs of the form <link description> can end up rendering improperly when displayed, but not when previewed. For example
The proper rendering is without any visible < or > . The actual rendering has a leading < and has the > in regular font color instead of link color, indicating that it thinks the URL has already closed.
(Answers dev) Please see HTML Entities section in http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/help/markup/
If you attach an image file using the paperclip and the file extension is not in lowercase, then when someone requests the file, the content will be transmitted as text/plain instead of as an image file.
If the exact same file is attached with the exact same base name but with .jpg in one case and with .JPG in the other case, then the .jpg will be transmitted as image but the .JPG will be transmitted as text. (The problem happens for other image types as well.)
I still can't download any files other than text from the link with Firefox; it converts .mat/.xls/etc. to text rather than copying the content. Not sure on whose end the fault lies; apparently maybe Firefox's as Chrome seems to work...but it has its own other "issues" so still haven't really adopted it.
(Answers dev) This issue was fixed in our release on 3/10/2016.
Mayhaps this explains the case in an interaction in another thread wherein an Excel file would only open in text? (Didn't notice the case of the extension...)
ADDENDUM The extension in the aforementioned attachment was lower case but the Excel file link opened as text. Mayhaps the poster screwed it up; I don't know precisely how to tell it that's so or not...
If there were a search tag based upon who last modified a post, then I would be able to search
contributor:roberson asked_at:7 -last_updated_by:roberson
to select postings in I had contributed but I was not the most recent contributor. Especially if this was combined with my proposed sortby:newest I could be filtering down to things that have been recently updated by someone other than me.
When a comment has been incorrectly automatically marked as spam, clicking on "This is not spam" sometimes times out and fails, repeatedly. Sometimes a different person is able to fix the flag, sometimes two people are not able to fix it. Possibly the operation is a bit load-dependent so it might be by chance as to whether any particular volunteer is able to correct the flag any particular time.
The timeout should be increased, or the operation should be made faster so it does not time out.
(I am assuming timeout is the reason here. We just get told it failed.)
A plea from those of us with RSI: please move the Delete confirmation window default position closer to the delete link. It adds up when zapping dozens of spams.