[DISCONTINUED] MATLAB Answers Wish-list #2 (and bug reports)
Walter Roberson
on 29 Jun 2012
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 earlier Wish-list for MATLAB Answer sections. That topic grew large enough to become unwieldy; and Mathworks has made enough changes to make a number of the past points no longer of relevance. There was also a more limited purpose <http://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/216662-new-design-of-the-forum-grey-on-white-wish-list-3-bug-reports
I suggest one wish (or bug report) per answer, so that people can vote their wishes.
227 Comments
For easy navigation and for the historians,
Anyone with edit privileges should feel free to update this whenever needed.
I sure wish Answers pages would load faster. Navigating the Answers section and sorting forum posts is remarkably slow, especially considering it's only text. And with the recent redesign of the site, there isn't even very much text at that.
Renato, this particular topic is about changes to the MATLAB Answers forum software, not about MATLAB itself.
Matlab lacks a more robust object oriented architecture that is related to how the majority of the myriad of functions are not structured in a hierarchical model, but rather exist on their own, loosely coupled one to another, even when there is a clear relationship between them.
In my simples example above, I compare the "Document Object Model" in a MS Office application (ie., Excel) with MatLab.
As you can see, if I want to graph a simple function, and at the same time change its axes, labels, and title... first, I have to know upfront the exact names of the specific five functions that would provide me those functionalities; Secondly, as I use the 'plot' function (the 'parent' function) by typing its name in the command window, the interface does not prompt me to the dependent ('child') methods and properties associated with the parent function; only allows me to complete the spelling (<Tab>)
What happens in more structured applications such as MS Excel, as you well know, is that beyond helping complete the spelling, there are more strict parent/child relationships between their (VBA) commands (objects). In such environments, a user could assume that typing 'plot' (or other meaningful command) in the command window's prompt, placing a period after the object handle and WITHOUT even pressing Tab, a dropdown list would appear revealing all of the associated / dependent commands (properties and methods) for the particular object/function to be immediately available for use.
In other words, there is no easy way to know what other commands I have available to use to manipulate/modify the graph/plot/parent object being used.
i wish matlab answer forum was quick and responsive as TI e2e community.
The "Flagged Content" page is broken. It shows items that have been flagged but there is no way to get to them. When you click "an answer" it should take you to the answer that had been flagged but instead it just reloads the "Flagged Content" page.
The contributor's page is broken, and currently only displays a bunch of # and commas.
I think that it would be better to have the forum adding automatically a target attribute
target="_blank"
to links present in threads, because we often want to keep the question/comment under our eyes when we click on such links.
I don't know if it's just the two totally different computers I've tried it on (Dell desktop and HP laptop) or if it's due to some Java "upgrade" but in the last few days whenever I try to type an Answer or Comment into an edit box, the "Preview" box covers up almost all of the Save button. Disabling it doesn't help. All I can see is a tiny sliver of the left side and top side of the button. I've tried two different browsers (Firefox and IE) and tried changing the zoom level of the displayed page (control-mouse wheel) and nothing helps - it's still covered up. The Cancel button is totally covered so I can't see that button at all anymore. I have Java 7 update 25 (the latest version according to http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp)
Is anyone else experiencing this problem with Answers?
I think that it would be very interesting to have the possibility to tag/flag/mark/attach/bookmark threads so we can keep track and follow them without posting an answer or a comment in the threads.
"Bookmarked" threads could appear in an additional (private?) tab in our profile, e.g. at the end of the current series of tabs:
/ Profile \/ Questions \/ Answers \/ Comments \/ Bookmarks \
Ideally, we could add a label (a string with same size limitation as threads titles) and have entries sorted by label, which would allow us to implement the classification scheme that we prefer (date, name, tags, main topic, etc).
At this point, I print relevant mature threads as PDF, which is not possible when threads are just starting; in such case, I leave a tab open on each relevant young thread, hoping that I will remember to look at them before I mess up with my browser and lose all my tabs, .. which is not ideal.
It would be interesting to be able to cast votes AGAINST Answers (or Questions?), as well as in favor of them :-)
I haven't decided whether this should affect rep points negatively, but it should at least help sink the Answer to the bottom of the display. It would be a good way for the community to collectively warn someone away from a bad approach (e.g., abuses of EVAL)
Apologies if this has been suggested. The list has grown long and difficult to search....
I think there should be a privilege (earned at 1000 reputation points or so) that allows contributors to transform an Answer into a Comment (and vice versa?)
All too often, newcomers to the site don't understand how things work and instead of responding to Answers with Comments, they respond with Answers of their own. It would be good for trusted contributors to have the power to fix this.
An optional chat room with a main channel and thread-specific channels or user defined channels would be awesome. The rational is that sometimes/often we would be able to pinpoint much better the needs from the beginning after a short chat, than when we refine the question statement iteratively through dozens of comments (and it doesn't always converge!). The quality of answers could be significantly improved.
For thread specific channels, the log of the discussion would be saved in the thread in a way that we can edit (e.g. remove irrelevant entries and edit remaining entries, so we keep only relevant content).
It isn't the easiest feature to implement though, and it would be difficult to prevent people from just chatting without saving answers if they can create user defined channels. A solution could be to limit the creation of user defined channels to Editors, and keep the main room as well as thread specific channels for the rest of us.
A failing formatting of code:
Here the formatting fails, when the space between "BC" and ">=" is removed:
|find(BC >= 2) .* find(BC <= 36)|
Working: find(BC >= 2) .* find(BC <= 36)
Failing: find(BC>= 2) .* find(BC <= 36)
Another feature that I would really appreciate is a select instead of the checkbox "Email me when answers are added to this question", that would offer more options. For example:
- Email me when answers are added to this question
- Email me when answers or comments are added to this question
- Email me when there is any activity on this thread
With that (and because the 3rd option could generate a lot of emails), I would also be interested in being allowed to choose the frequency of the emails with a second select (or something in my profile options), e.g.
- Email instantly..
- Daily summary..
- Weekly summary..
The rational for me is: I don't ask that many questions, but when I do I am genuinely interested in any piece of information that I can gather from anything on the thread/page. I don't really make a distinction between comments and answers in fact, in the sense that I could often define The Answer as the outcome of multiple answers and comments. I am also interested in being warned if any answer or comment is edited, because if the person who answered/commented believes that it is worth bringing a modification, then the update is important to me. I would therefore set my default to be the last item of the list/select mentioned above.
As mentioned here, I think that having the possibility for the OP and high rep. members to add a top entry in the thread (like an answer but with a different design, e.g. greenish background or some frame) called "Synthesis" or "Conclusion", that would contain a synthesis/conclusion of the thread, would be interesting. This should be optional and worth no reward, so we have only valuable information, but highly prioritized by the search engine. The name of contributors should also be recorded in the sense that, at least to me, they are often a search criterion as important as keywords.
You can find an example of what I have in mind here, where I edited the question with a top part that synthesizes the thread: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/59491-is-it-possible-to-set-watchdogs-memory-exec-time-in-matlab
The idea is really to allow people who care for that to bring added value to their threads. This could be especially useful for complicated threads, where finally a person is able to draw a conclusion out of dozens of answers/comments. The conclusion is really important information, yet it doesn't appear in the thread ultimately.
As a side note, I think that having the option not to prop. the thread at the top of the list when we edit the synthesis could be useful.. in my case, for example, I am pretty sure that people will start being tired about my "watchdog" thread if it comes back at the top of the list each time I add a coma to the text.. ;)
I think that if people were reminded (e.g. weekly) on a verified email that they have to come back to "close" their threads (or to actively indicate that they could still use help), more people would at least come back and see what was answered/commented. I am saying that, because I really suspect that many people actually find some way to do what they want after posting the question, and never come back to check their threads. All of you folks who have been active here for a long time, have roughly a 1/3 ratio of accepted answers, but when I look at the threads it seems that a significant amount of the answers that were not accepted are just a consequence of people not coming back..
Associated with this mechanism, there could be a special type of threads for open questions, in some sense a "discussion thread", like this one or any of those that should not have a particular answer chosen to be The answer.
Cheers,
Cedric
I am trying to find unanswered questions with 0 votes, but I want them listed newest to oldest. If I search for unanswered and sort by votes, I get all the questions with 0 votes sorted by date, but oldest to newest, followed by all the questions wit 1 vote, again sorted oldest to newest.
I am trying to close unclear and inappropriate questions which are unanswered. Basically I am trying to work through the unanswered questions. If the question is reasonable, I vote for it. If the question is inappropriate or unclear I add a comment saying what is inappropriate or unclear and close it. This leads me to needing the odd sort order/search capability.
I guess the first question is, is this filtering useful?