MATLAB Answers Down?

I am unable to load new questions or recent questions (answered or unanswered). My feed is filled with activity from questions from 2011 being closed by the MATLAB Answer Bot in 2021. Other questions in the unanswered feed date before 2021 as well.

The total answered questions is numbered at 3747, with 1880 accepted answers and 266 unanswered questions.

Is it just me or is the forum down? Does anyone have any idea about this?

[DGM]

I'm guessing there's some late-night cleanup going on. Looks like the answers bot closed a bunch of ancient unanswerable junk questions.

What's curious are all the posts from 2011 that had activity in early 2023 (including a lot of things that I had done cleanup on). I don't know why those are all getting bumped again. I know that a lot of old threads from 2011-2012 are buggy (uneditable or unmovable posts, weird nonstandard formatting in places). There may be problems left over from old forum migrations being addressed under the hood, though the ones I have bookmarked are still messed up.

[Atsushi Ueno]

>Is it just me or is the forum down? Does anyone have any idea about this?

You are not the only one. But the forum is fine. I could not find any deleted questions.The filter does not seem to be working properly. The biggest problem for me is that the Japanese filter is not working.

[Star Strider]

There was a significant Answers upgrade a few days ago, however that went off without a hitch. This was likely and unplanned outage.

[Dyuman Joshi]

" I don't know why those are all getting bumped again."

I am wondering the same as well.

"I know that a lot of old threads from 2011-2012 are buggy (uneditable or unmovable posts, weird nonstandard formatting in places"

That's interesting to know.

@Atsushi Ueno, Thanks for the clarification.

@Star Strider, do you know what that upgrade was related to?

[Star Strider]

@Dyuman Joshi — One had to do with the new voting options, and the other was an extension of the ‘paperclip’ icon function that allowed copying of existing attachments to the current Answer or Comment so that they could be read without having to copy the entire URL or using websave. Those are the only ones I’m aware of. (By the time I logged on this morning — about 10:00 Z — the Answers problems had been solved, and Answers was working normally.)

[Rik]

There is still something odd going on. If I search for threads answered by me, I only get 2 results. I distinctly remember answering more than two questions on this forum.

[DGM]

Yeah, I'm really glad I have a lot of things bookmarked. The search really isn't very useful at the moment.

[Dyuman Joshi]

Have this been informed to TMW? Or should I contact TMW Support?

Hopefully a staff member can answer this.

[Star Strider]

I just e-mailed the TMW person in charge of Answers, and included the URL of this thread.

I did not notify any one yesterday, since Answers was working by the time I accessed it yesterday (Sunday) morning at about 10:00 Z.

[Walter Roberson]

@DGM

Some posts from before the newer Answers Editor use the older internal editor format. If the author or an Editor edits the post on Desktop then the Answers Editor tries to convert from the old format to the new format, but every once in a while it encounters posts that it is not able to convert. That happens especially in cases where the original post used a glitch in the old editor -- for example the older editor supported some forms of HTML injection (which could sometimes get triggered accidentally.)

The older internal editor is not completely gone; it is still used for people using Mobile, so on rare occasions you will encounter a more modern post whose format cannot be properly converted; not at all often for newer posts, though.

[DGM]

I kind of figured as much. I've run across a few that I needed to clear and reconstruct from plain text. I didn't know there were still potential new cases.

Answer 1

[Rena Berman]

(Answers Dev) @Star Strider, @Dyuman Joshi, @DGM, @Atsushi Ueno, @Rik There was an issue over the weekend that caused all but 4k questions to be removed from search result indexing. No data was lost, just the pool of questions available as results for searches was almost fully deleted. I have started the process to restore the pool of available questions for search results. It is now complete and Answers should be running normally.

[DGM]

Aww dang! Now I can't say I have 3x as many answers as Rik!

[Rena Berman]

:)

[Star Strider]

@Rena Berman — Thank you!

[Dyuman Joshi]

Thanks for the update, Rena!