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From: Rob Campbell on 18 Jan 2010 12:54
The FEX admins should take heed of this thread because the site is being abused at the moment and nobody is dealing with it. If steps aren't taken to improve signal to noise then people will start to leave.

The star rating system isn't useful and is somewhat arbitrary. We should ditch it and rely only on comments and download history. As Oleg says: It should be possible for the comments submitted by users should be rated "helpful/not helpful." A setting in one's preferences can be used to threshold which comments are seen. Users should be encouraged to rate comments by receiving a comment rating tally next to their username. A similar system could be applied to rate importance of comments and ratings from individual authors. In this manner the community will remove unwanted material by natural selection.

If you insist on allowing spam onto the FEX then you must have a process for allowing users to effectively filter content as they see fit. The "-author:" is helpful but doesn't go far enough: we need to a way to filter the /effects/ of malicious individuals.
From: Helen Chen on 18 Jan 2010 17:20
"Rob Campbell" <matlab(a)robertREMOVEcampbell.removethis.co.uk> wrote in message <hj277t$jqk$1(a)fred.mathworks.com>...
> The FEX admins should take heed of this thread because the site is being abused at the moment and nobody is dealing with it. If steps aren't taken to improve signal to noise then people will start to leave.
>
Hi Rob and others on this thread ...
I just wanted to post a note to acknowledge everyone's feedback. We do care about your feedback and we do listen to suggestions. Many of the new features on File
Exchange came from user suggestions at some point. Sometimes this is hard in a community as not everyone has the same use model so we try to do what fits in the overall site and our community.

> The star rating system isn't useful and is somewhat arbitrary.
>

Comment noted and has been being debated for a while. Some folks are fans of the ratings, though as you note, there are other ways of approaching this. You can certainly ignore the ratings and just look at comments or download numbers by clicking on the column headings to sort the list you are looking at.
Example: Sorting of for the most comments in the past week is at: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?dir=desc&duration=7&sort=comments&term=

You can bookmark the link and use it instead of the home page. Note that the user interface does not allow for a secondary sort to enable sort by # comments/ratings AND # downloads. Question to all - do you feel this is critical for how you are using MATLAB Central? Would you be willing to talk to our Usability Engineer to share your thoughts?

> The "-author:" is helpful but doesn't go far enough: we need to a way to filter the /effects/ of malicious individuals.

Have you tried using watch lists? The output of your watches is aggregated on your watch page. This means that you are only looking at things that you have flagged that you want to watch.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to feedback. I do appreciate yourthoughtful dialog!

Best,
Helen Chen and the MATLAB Central Team
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