Newsgroup or "Ask Question"

Another stupid question to ask.

I have not been to the matlab newsgroup for a while. So what do people normally do now if they ask question.

Do people post questions to the good old newsgroup or this "Ask Question" thing?

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

See prior discussion: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/46411-question-about-the-use-of-answers

I like Answers better because I can edit my response. That's impossible with the newsgroup. I can also apply formatting (bold, links, italics, etc.) which you can't do in the newsgroup.

[Matt Fig]

Same-same.

[Kevin]

But which one (old matlab newsgroup or Ask Questions) has higher chances of getting answers?

That is which one is being used most by people (not just Mathworks staff)?

Does this mean that if I want to maximize my chance of getting answer, I need to post the same questions in 2 places?

[Walter Roberson]

It is not at all practical to get clear estimates of the number of people who read the Newsgroup -- Newsgroups are inherently distributed systems and the message transfer software involved is not designed for collecting statistics on end use.

The best one can do in practice on Newsgroups is to count the number of authors during a time period.

The Answers forum could in theory track the number of different logged-in users who read each message. Tracking the number of different people who do not log to do the reading is more difficult. Whatever statistics Mathworks has collected have not been made public.

With Answers, it is possible for users to track the number of registered users (though possibly that is MATLAB Central registered users rather than Answers- specific.) It is also possible (but no tools provided) to track the number of users who have posted questions or answers (the counts for comments are not shown.)

There is a "Trendy" plot for the number of Answers Questions. I estimate it is running about 2500 per month, about 85 per day. That includes all Answers and Comments.

[Image Analyst]

You can post it both places. There are those who do just the newsgroup, like dpb and Bruno and Steven, and those who do just the Answers forum, like Walter and Jan, and those who do both, like me and Sean. It seems to me that the postings in Answers get answered more quickly but I have no data to back that up. I do notice answers being answered often within a minute or two of posting in Answers. If you post from the Mathworks news reader, it can take 5 minutes just for it to show up - it's quicker on Google, almost instantaneous.

[Helen Chen]

I think a bigger influencer on getting your question answer is writing your question well, so that other community members can easily understand what you have done, and what are your questions.

See Oleg's tutorial more information on how to write your question. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/6200-tutorial-how-to-ask-a-question-on-answers-and-get-a-fast-answer