Poll is CLOSED
Poll
How much time should be spent searching for a solution before asking a question in the forum?
Don't waste time searching-just ask
6%
A few minutes or 1-2 searches
21%
A few hours, most Qs aren't unique
40%
Days-asking for help is last resort
14%
Infinite. I'll never ask a question
20%
23801 votes
38 Comments
I voted for the 'few hours' option but for the last question I asked, I spent couple of days trying to find an answer. Anyway, this is just an outreach comment for more people to see my unsolved question :)
Most of the time it takes a little research to fully understand what it is we are trying to solve. So, the research is to see what other similar problems others have investigated. So, then you can explain more precisely your problem and get better answers and quicker responses.
most easy questions are not worthy asking, you can find them in 2 minutes of google.
most hard questions are also not worthy asking, few will have the 'ready' answer, fewer will be willing to actually answer. you will likely get no answer, it's the type of question you should look for answers in papers, not forums.
in the end the only questions worth trying to ask for help are those you don't even know where to start your search. desperate questions, really.
I think the question entirely depends on your situation. Like if you forgot very silly thing then you should not waste your time to recall it. But if you are pursung your career particulary in computation field and you have time to think about the solution then don't post or ask any question. Then only you can create something new.
I usually serach for half an hour to one hour, and if I can't find anything even close to what I'm looking for, I'll ask.
It's purely selfish. Asking on the forum isn't going to get you an answer quickly, googling will most likely get you the answer quickly.
Do folks search their questions on Mathworks? I always end up using google to search my questions and expect to find my results showing MATLAB Central posts. Maybe I should just cut out the middle man and search here directly.
I usually look for a few hours before starting a question. As I build up the question, I continue to search and try things. After a few days without resolution I'm ready to post. I haven't got there yet.
Most recently, my question was "How can I merge nested cell row vectors of cell row vectors*?". I wanted to build a 1xn (or nx1) list of solutions (in this case strings) from a recursive function where each call may itself return a list, and the calling function modifies the recursive returns (in this case by prepending strings). Turns out the answer is [nested_vector{:}]. That expression makes NO sense to me, but it does close enough to what I need. It de-nests exactly one deep. If the cell vector only has non-cells, it tries to merge their contents. In the case of a row vector of strings, it makes one big string with no spaces.
- * (column vectors of column vectors would have also worked)
There is an error in the poll.
The question is "How much time SHOULD be spent..." and the last answer is "Infinte. I'll never ask a question".
After reading the last answer people might think it is about what you actually do and not what you should do.
(Also the time span between a few minutes and hours is probably too big. I think the right answer is somewhere between these two answers.)
I agree w/ @Walter Roberson that I find the searching facility to be of little help -- I've got a bunch of things I know I've posted over the years and while I'm not even close to the volume Walter has, I never think to create a database of "things that might be useful again" so I rarely can find the post of interest even when I know it was mine.
The paucity of results per page that I've complained about since the introduction doesn't help; it just takes too long to page down page after page to make that feasilble --and the Q? titles, since are posted by the original poster are, as often as not, not even related to the real subject and remembering how it was posted is impossible.
It's the latter I think that limits the usefulness of the search engine as compared to googlesearch as much as anything, I think...it has a lot better chance the title subject matches the content and has a much larger viable population from which to choose. I've posited also since almost the beginning there needs to be more structure/restrictions placed on the title/subject.
Similar limitations hold for tags...the user doesn't have a clue most time -- I have a hard time coming up with those even for my own Q? despite 30+ year w/ MATLAB to make them really pertinent.
Have a strong feeling the answer is skewed by gender. BTW I am female.
There needs to be an increment between "a few minutes" compared to "hours". for example 15 to 30 minutes.
An important factor is how well the Answers forum search engine works. For some reason, I find it very hard to locate posts on a particular question, even when I know they exist. If it worked as well as google search, I think that the auto-suggestions made when a question is being composed would obviate the whole issue.
I find this distribution difficult to believe; then again, maybe people who can't be bothered to click on the answers that appear as they create a new question also can't be bothered to click on a poll.
That's a loaded question. I wonder if people will answer according to the question ("should") or what they actually do.