A new support option: the CVX Forum

CVX has reached a download pace of over 10,000 downloads per year! The acceptance of CVX in research settings has been amazing—and challenging. Supporting all of our users via email, as we have done for the last 6 years, is simply no longer feasible.

Of course, if you have found a bug in CVX, we want to hear about it; see our support page for information on submitting bug reports. CVX is on a rapid-release cycle, so a reported bug can be often fixed and made available to users in just a few short days.

But in fact, bug reports represent only a fraction of our total support effort. Most of our time is spent helping people to become effective users of CVX. Sometimes, this involves answering a usage question that is frequently asked, but not readily included in standard documentation. In other cases, it involves offering advice on how to implement a particular model found in a paper or application.

If only we were experts in the myriad applications in which that CVX has been applied. Alas, we are not; but our users are! It is clear to us that what is needed is an online knowledgebase and a community-driven Q&A forum—a place where the valuable experience of our large user community can be collected, organized, and shared.

That is the purpose of our new creation, the CVX Forum.

If you have visited sites such as Stack Overflow or OR Exchange, then the CVX Forum should look very familiar. Sites such as these have proven to be extremely successful at providing community-based support on a variety of topics. Through a novel voting system, the site self-organizes so that common questions and their most helpful answers are easy to find, creating a rich knowledgebase that no user manual can match. The CVX Forum will be a great place to discuss (and vote upon!) feature requests as well.

We encourage all CVX users to join us at the CVX Forum and join in a communal effort to improve the state of disciplined convex programming. Frankly, some of our users are better qualified to answer some of the questions we receive than we are! We hope you will prove us right.