Is deleting threads helpful in this forum?
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We have lost a lot of important questions and answers, because the authors decided to delete the threads.
- This erases the work of those who have spent time in creating the answers and in consequence the motivation to answer is reduced.
- I've seen several homework questions disappearing, such that the teachers or professors cannot detect such cheating anymore.
- The deleted thread are usually important for the personal reputation (not the numerical reputation number). E.g. it is helpful to see, if the author cared for further inquiries or if a question was answered already but the author does not want to care about it.
I'd prefer to let only TMW and the editors delete threads if they conflict with the idea of this forum (Don't section in About MATLAB Answers) or if the author asks for deleting and mentions any reason. But without a reason, editing the message should be enough.
Do you agree or are there good reasons to let the authors delete their threads if they like to?
[EDITED] I've expanded the topic to overwriting a question with garbage. I suggest that editors and admins reconstruct such messages (e.g. from Google's cache), until the authors ask for deleting with a good reason. Thanks.
댓글 수: 4
Thomas
2012년 5월 1일
+1 I agree with you.. helps us keep track of older questions and sometimes offer contexts to a particular question..
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Wayne King
2011년 9월 19일
I agree with you. The ability to edit and/or add comments is sufficient unless there is some compelling reason to remove the thread.
Wayne
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TAB
2011년 9월 19일
I am agree with Deniel. Deleting a post should be allowed only for question that is unanswered and not commented.
As author delete the question, it also wash-up the efforts by person who have spent time to find answer of that question.
댓글 수: 2
Image Analyst
2011년 9월 19일
That's my vote too. Who knows how many "This is a test" posts have been posted and (thankfully) deleted by novices.
Walter Roberson
2011년 9월 23일
It is entirely plausible that I have posted more "this is a test" posts than all of the novices combined ;-)
Fangjun Jiang
2011년 9월 19일
I agree! OP can always edit the question. I would encourage everyone to edit it as the question become clear. Right now, there are many questions that their titles are not-to-the-point and there are serious typos in it.
Many times, I've edit my answer when I read it later and found typos.
There is no edit capability on the comment so far. I would like to have that too.
댓글 수: 0
Daniel Shub
2011년 9월 19일
I think the OP should be able to delete a question when there are no answers (and maybe no comments). Once people have put some effort into answering the question, it should stay. The advantage of deleting unanswered questions is that it might be useful for double posts etc.
There also should be something that makes editing restricted. The OP should not be allowed to delete the text of the question.
Edit: 20-Sept As Walter pointed out, figuring out which questions have no useful answers/comments is difficult. Often a duplicate question will get a quick comment/answer that states it is a duplicate question
I think that when a user requests to delete a question, anyone who has provided an answer or a comment on the question, but not a comment on an answer should be asked for approval.
댓글 수: 4
Walter Roberson
2012년 10월 8일
Yes, people are now editing their question away and deleting all the rest of their contribution to the question.
Randy Souza
2012년 10월 22일
When you see deletion-by-editing please flag the question and/or send email directly to me (<firstname>.<lastname>@mathworks.com). If the question was particularly valuable, I can restore the previous text.
Walter Roberson
2011년 9월 19일
We need posters to be able to consolidate their duplicate questions down to manageable threads: you cannot rely on the staff and editors to do all that merging on behalf of the posters (for one thing there would be no incentive for the posters not to start new threads, knowing that if they were wrong, someone else will clean up after them.)
If the duplicate threads contain only comments or answers along the lines of "This is a duplicate, please clean up", or even "I already gave you the answer over there", then nothing is lost in deleting the comments and answers.
If the duplicate threads contain real answers or comments of relevance not already expressed, then they need to be merged, which is unfortunately not something that there are tools for even within Mathworks (as far as I can tell.) At least not that preserve ownership and votes and which update "Questions answered" and so on.
If a thread of complete irrelevance to MATLAB is posted, the editors or staff usually find it in due time, but I would not object to someone being able to delete their own completely-irrelevant thread.
If a theory question is posted, then matters get a bit tricky. The question might be expressed as pure theory, or the question might be expressed as how to implement a theory in MATLAB.
The pure theory questions can sometimes be of interest to keep our mental wits sharp even if there is no immediate connection to MATLAB; the poster of such a question does, however, need to understand that obtaining an answer here is sheer good luck and that there are more appropriate resources for (e.g.,) communications theory. Comments about where the poster might have better success are contextually fair and useful comments, but at some point having the posting pruned would be good cleanup. Speaking as an editor, though: I don't like just deleting these and hoping the poster gets the idea essentially, and I don't have time to construct email to them describing why their message was deleted and doing my own research in to where they might better have posted
The questions about implementing a theory in MATLAB: although hypothetically those could be interesting and challenging, it seems to me that the great majority these questions that we attract are from people who really do not know anything about the theory and probably don't really care, but want the MATLAB source code anyhow (e.g., because it would be 95% of the work of their final year project.)
Editing the content of a posting: users need to be able to do this in order to correct typos, fix formatting, add clarifications. And some of that needs to be allowed even after people have answered. None-the-less, if someone asks a homework question and gets a useful contribution, I am not sure that it is fair that they should be able to delete the traces of the discussion afterwards, even if only by editing the content of their question to be "Never-mind; ignore this".
Richard Brown
2012년 5월 1일
My opinion is that a question can be deleted until it has been answered. Then it can't. Editors, and only editors, should be able to merge questions.
It is infuriating when someone deletes a question with an answer that I've put any significant time or thought into. It's like someone taking your work and flushing it down the toilet, and makes me feel like not contributing any more.
댓글 수: 3
Walter Roberson
2012년 5월 2일
I've been musing, trying to figure out ways to watermark MATLAB code in such a way that deleting the obvious watermark lines would be self-detected and cause the program to halt. I haven't come up with anything yet, though.
Sean de Wolski
2012년 5월 2일
Walter, that should be a question of itself. I have an attempt at an answer going, but it's clearly a challenging problem.
Daniel Shub
2012년 5월 1일
I think we need a "question of shame" where we can answer with names/profile pages of individuals who have deleted questions. Better would be if TMW would just turn off deleting. At this point I would rather have 1000s of duplicate questions, that we can tag as duplicate, then allow people to delete questions along with OUR answers and comments.
댓글 수: 4
Daniel Shub
2012년 5월 2일
I agree that we do not want to shame people, but I am not sure if attempting to keep relevant statistic is shameful. Some people might be "shamed" by having asked a large number of questions or given a lot of answers, but TMW doesn't let us hide that or even post anonymously ...
K E
2012년 7월 31일
편집: K E
2012년 7월 31일
The only time I have been tempted to delete one of my own questions is when I have been exposed as an idiot for asking it. However I take this as a instructive humility lesson and there they remain. I do not mean that I have been shamed by the answerers, just that after the lightbulb went off I wished I had not asked it in the first place.
Jan
2012년 12월 13일
댓글 수: 6
Walter Roberson
2012년 12월 13일
We had a big spate of these about two weeks ago.
I seem to recall one in which the user re-deleted. I've lost the mental details, though.
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