Question about the use of "Answers"

Hi,

maybe simple questions but,

1) If you comment on a question, that you are interested in, is there an easy way to track this. Let's say that you want to follow up on how the question was solved? For me it seems that I can only follow the questions I placed an answer to, 2) When to post a question under "answers" and when to post in the Newsgroup? Is "anwers " rather for simple problems?

thanks for any clarification

Jürgen

Answer 1

[Kaustubha Govind]

Both questions have been discussed previously:

1. I don't believe the ability to follow threads (that you have not "answered") currently exists. It has been posted on the wishlist. Perhaps you can vote up Lucas' suggestion.
2. Answers vs Newsgroup

[Jürgen]

ok, thanks for the link, sould have searched the forum first

[Jan]

Searching the forum before asking is a good idea in every case.

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

you can bookmarks a link of your comment,

within each commennt, there are : link flag edit and delete

for more details http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/about/answers/

[Jürgen]

Okay thanks,didn't see the link, and the search directive are also useful( but the flag is not the right tool, as I understood + Still what about my second question? regards,J

Answer 3

[Jan]

I'm amused by your observation, that Answers could focus on "simple problems". Actually this was not the intention. But the purpose of this forum has not been defined exactly until today. TMW and the contributors are still in waiting in which direction the forum develops itself. On one hand this means that a lot of chances has been lost, on the other hand it is a great opportunity, because you, Jürgen, can participate in the development of the nature of this forum. If you start to ask complicated and interesting questions, the challenge level will increase!

After the first few month it has been discussed repeatedly if the quality of the questions is decreasing. We have a lot of noise here in form of "please format your code", "please post the code/any details/a picture", "<does not work> does not allow to understand the problem" and "read the documentation/FAQ". Actually one of the intentions of this forum has been to reduce this noise compared to the CSSM forum. The possibility to edit the questions, answers and comments is still the best solution for this problem, but I dream of more powerful strategies.

[Jürgen]

Hi,

first of all I did not want to offend you by talking about simple answers. It was just an impression I got when comparing some posts.

secondly simple is good :-), I like simple solutions :-)

Thirdly, I am really impressed by the forum, nearly all my questions were answered in a decent way,

And finally, maybe a good mix of simple questions and complicated ones is necessary, Sometime people only have time to help somebody with a short answer, sometimes when it is really in their research topic they will be interested to solve more complicated questions

Anyway, for me the forum is important added value when I compare matlab to other software , that does not offer this kind support

regardsJ

[Jan]

No problem, Jürgen. I've called it an "observation", because this impression has been reported by several users independent from each other. In consequence it is not offending but a fact.

Currently I think the Answers forum has not the critical mass of advanced contributors to answer complicated questions inside a certain range of time.

[Jürgen]

It all depends on what you see as complicated, and also what is a certain range of time? a so some interesting stuff on image processing and vector problems , I 'll try to visit the forum reguraly

[Jan]

• Complicated == Finding a solution means a challenging fun. This means that the level depends on the skill of the answering person. Counter-example: "Please format your code/provide details/read the docs" means no fun.
• Certain range of time == 24 h