@Will 

I don't recall what I was searching for. It had only 2 pages of responces, and the second page was exactly the same as the first one - just saying page 2 of 2 instead of page 1 of 2.

I tried several examples now - and got significantly different results, with much more responces - 40 pages, 400 pages etc. The second page was different than the first one in every case I tried.

Alec

I may be wrong, but it seems as if this post had several responces on old Mapleprimes (unless there was a similar one with the same content.) What has happened with them (or my memory is not precise)?

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

Using citations might seem like a good idea in this particular example - in particular, I cited that Joe Riel's post several times. Another example where that may work is Paulina Chin's post about assignment to f(x) . But in many other examples that won't work like that - in particular, I cited several posts in my blog just to say that the question came from there, or saying that something not that correct may be there.

A better (and normal) way would be not trying to invent a new way of recalculating of old scores, but just using them - they were pretty well aligned as far as I recall - much better than they are now.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

@alex_01 

I like your posts and I agree with Joe Riel that your rating is well earned. Just well earned rating of several other people was somehow erased.

If you really meant what you were saying, it might be a good idea to vote up posts of people that you think helped you - at least that's what I would do.

Alec

@Will 

Yes, that was an interesting information - still not complete at this point - for example, how the Maplesoft blog posts were counted was not answered.

But what with the number of views - is there any rational explanation why that was erased?

Alec

@Axel Vogt 

I just really don't see why that was done that way. What Will described - that somebody logged in and posted hundreds of comments that nobody cared about, never happened - not even tens of posts.

On the other hand, Robert Israel's position moved from 1st to 5th, which is absolutely not fair, and I don't see how that could be called a good job.

Also, 2 users, alex_01 and Cristopher2222, while being respectable members of the community, and I don't want to say anything bad about them, moved much higher in the top users list than they used to be - because most of their posts had a lot of comments, and I don't see how that might be related to their Maple knowledge (which may be good, just not related to the amount of comments, I think.)

A typical example - this thread. It has 6 comments and might get more in time. That would add 24 points to Will's score if it was in old Mapleprimes. How is that related to his Maple knowledge?

Alec

Since nobody else but me seem to have problems with that, that may be OK - the significant difference with the old scoring system is only in 3 or 4 cases, which will be corrected itself in time.

Still, a normal way of doing that would be to post a poll suggesting several ways of doing that, and go with the poll decision - perhaps, with counting the poll votes weighted by people scores. It may be not too late to do that even now.

And how the new items were calculated - Maplesoft blog, in particular?

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

Will,

Thank you for describing the way the recalculations were done.

While it may seem working OK in many cases, but there are (at least) 2 problems with that.

First, applying new rules backwards is not something that should be ever done. The previous scores were officially established, and moving to the new version of Mapleprimes, a normal way would be to preserve them, and not invent some new system of recalculating them. By preserving I mean either saving them as they were, or multiplying by some coefficient - either 4 or, which seems more natural with new inflated scores, by 5.

Changing the scoring system backwards gives an idea that moving to the v.3 version of Mapleprimes, the scores might be recalculated again in some new and unpredictable way.

The second problem is that your classification what is the answer and what is a comment, and in which cases 4 points should be added, being quite subjective, in many cases is wrong, as the Unanswered Questions section shows, in particular, in which almost all questions are actually answered.

Preserving scores as they were (with some coefficient), would be much easier to do, consistent, and fair.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

@John May 

At approximately the same time, in 70th-80th there was a similar phenomenon in Russia - many newborn girls get named after the popular heroines of South-American and Australian soap operas. Also misspeled in many cases.

Alec

@pagan 

First, I haven't made any claims. Whatever I say off topic, is usually (at least a half of it) a joke. It has nothing to do with logic.

Second, while being mostly a joke, it looks quite close to the truth (as it often happens.)

Third, also partially a joke, but still - saying to a mathematician that he or she might have some problems with logic, is the same as, say, saying to a bartender that he or she can't tell a difference between a glass of milk and a glass of Baileys. It looks as if you didn't see many mathematicians in real life. Logic is a part of our professional training. Proofs are what we do, daily and nightly. It is what makes a difference between a mathematician and any other scientist. We can't get it wrong even if we would like to. It's in the blood. Mistakes are a different story - but not at this level.

Alec

@Marvin Ray Burns 

That one seems to be almost OK - it dispays something - not something that one would expect, but still - after pasting it in the HTML source (click HTML in the top left corner in the editor). And it even got converted to html - without pictures.

-101101101101-101^(1/101)

Alec

Also, the number of views seems to get lost transferring to this new v.2 of Mapleprimes. Some of my posts, like Numerical Inverse Laplace Transform (which I posted as a kind of a joke originally, but many people took seriously), had more than 10,000 views - it shouldn't be hard to transfer the old number of views here - it is in the database.

Regarding thumbs-up voters I have 2 comments - first, that list is certainly not complete - I got a strong impression that I left more thumb-up votes than many of them, and I am not on that list, and 2nd - a half of them, 7 out of 14 are from Maplesoft, which is a significantly different ratio than actual Maplesoft employers participation on this site. Also, I got a strong impression that those Maplesoft voters-up voted up mostly other (each other) Maplesoft employers posts - otherwise they won't get that high (still quite low though, but much higher than it used to be) in the user reputation list.

The most difference though is between alex_01 position there and here. I wonder how that could happen. Robert Israel's lower position here than there can be explained, I think, by the fact that many of his valuable contributions he made as comments - and they were not counted, unlike some of mine not that valuable that were counted - I often replied in the main thread instead of replying to a comment because replying to a comment prevented a person writing that comment from editing it on old Mapleprimes.

Whatever way was used for converting the old user rating to the new one - it was not done the right way. The old rating was officially established and it should be saved in some form - either 1-1, or 1-5, i.e. multiplying everybody's old rating by 5. I hope it's not too late to change that - adding the newly acquired points to the old ones, properly converted.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

In general, with Stack Overflow being successful, mostly because of attracting a large community of programmers not concentrating on any specific topic, none of its copiers, concentrating on some specific topics were even close to that success AFAICT. In particular, the mathematics site is quite a disaster - not total, but close to that.

Thus far, I got mixed feelings abot this v.2 of Mapleprimes. Most of old discussions got mixed up randomly -  replies are printed higher than the comments they are replying to and so on. I've suggested already to provide a copy of old Mapleprimes from a different URL - something like old.mapleprimes.com. That would make reading old posts much easier.

In general, the navigation here seems to be more difficult than it used to be.

On the other hand, some people stopping posting on Mapleprimes for a while, seem to be getting back.

Glad to see you posting here, Jacques - I was getting quite bored last couple of weeks.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

@JacquesC 

Exactly my thought.

If it's automatic - it is either buggy, or has more than 3 days delay (or both :).

Alec

There is a mapletviewer for viewing .maplet files, but I think one still needs Maple to use it.

Also, there is a possibility to run MapleNet (or other Maple server) on your web site, but one has to pay Maplesoft something for that, I think.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member