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Several major updates have been introduced to Answers’ reputation system! The updates include a new User Levels system, a new Editor indicator, and updated badges series.

1. User Levels

User Levels have become a best practice for many community sites to adopt. They help build trust in the community and provide recognition to contributors. There are 10 levels in the system and the labels will display next to users’ names throughout MATLAB Answers and on your community profile. We hope to see more users climb the ladder and level up!

2. Editor Indicators

Becoming an Editor (upon earning 3,000 points) is a huge milestone in Answers. Therefore, we introduced the Editor indicator to show our appreciation. From the screenshot below, you will notice a user can have both a User Level and an Editor indicator.

3. Updated Badge Series

Based on our analysis of existing badges, we decided to introduce 2 new badges into existing series and retire an entire badge series.

• The Knowledgeable badge series and the Thankful badge series now have 5 levels.

• The Revival badge series has been archived and is no longer being awarded. If you earned one of these badges, it would still show up in your community profile.

You will find more information on Answers help page . If you have any questions, comments or feedback, free feel to leave a comment below.

Cody is a useful tool to practice MATLAB skills not only by solving the problems but also learn from each other’s solutions. Sometimes you see subpar solutions that are cheats and hacks. With the flagging feature we released recently, you can help us identify solutions that administrators, including Community Advisory Board members, can review and delete.

How to flag?

Flag Options - Only available on solutions

Every day, thousands of people ask questions on MATLAB Answers and many of these are about their code. Questions such as “How can I make this faster?”, “Why do I get this error message?” or “Why don’t I get the answer I expect?”. There’s often one crucial thing missing though – the code in question!

Most of the people who answer questions on MATLAB Answers are volunteers from the community. They are answering your questions for fun, to learn more about MATLAB or just because they like to be helpful. This is even true for people such as me who are MathWorks members of staff. It’s not part of my role to patrol the community, looking where I can help out. I do it because I like to do it.

Make it easier to help me help you.

Imagine you’re a volunteer, looking for something interesting to answer. What kind of questions are you more likely to dig into and help an anonymous stranger figure out?

In my case, I almost always focus on problems that I can easily reproduce. I rarely know the answer to any question off the top of my head and so what I like to do is start off with the problem you are facing and use the various tools available to me such as the profiler or debugger to figure it out. This is the fun of it all for me – I almost always learn something by doing this and you get helped out as a side effect!

The easier I can reproduce your issue, the more likely I am to get started. If I can’t reproduce anything and the answer isn’t immediately obvious to me I’ll just move onto the next question. One example that demonstrates this perfectly is a case where someone’s MATLAB code was running too slowly. All of the code was available so I could run it on my machine, profile it and provide a speed-up of almost 150x.

It's not always feasible or desirable to post all of your code in which case you need to come up with a minimal, reproducible example. What’s the smallest amount of code and data you can post that I can run on my machine and see what you see? This may be more work for you but it will greatly increase your chances of receiving an answer to your question.