I'd recommend either having two or three good examples of acceptable posts at the end of the posting guide or at least some hyperlinks to good examples. Two or three contrasting poor posts would also be helpful.
If people can see a brief email with working code AND the ever-essential sessionInfo() output I think they will be more likely to compose a reasonable post. It's not rocket science when you see a few examples of good posts, but reading lines and lines of text describing a good post clearly is not getting through to many people. Steve McKinney -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Gabor Grothendieck Sent: Fri 6/6/2008 10:30 AM To: R Development List Subject: [Rd] Posting Guide People read the posting guide yet they are still unable to create an acceptable post. e.g. https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-June/164092.html I think the problem is that the guide is not clear or concise enough. I suggest we add a summary at the beginning which gets to the heart of what a poster is expected to provide: Summary To maximize your change of getting a response when posting provide (1) commented, (2) minimal, (3) self-contained and (4) reproducible code. (This one line summary also appears at the end of each message to r-help.) "Self-contained" and "reproducible" mean that a responder can copy the questioner's code to the clipboard, paste it into their R session and see the same problem you as the questioner see. Note that dput(mydata) will display mydata in a reproducible way. Self-contained and reproducible are needed because: (1) Self-Effort. It shows that the questioner tried to solve the problem by themself first. (2) Test framework. Often the responder needs to play with the code a bit in order to respond or at least to give the best answer. They can't do that without a test framework that includes the data and the code to run it and its not fair to ask them to not only answer the question but also to come up with test data and to complete incomplete code. (3) Archives. Questions and answers go into the archives so they are not only for the benefit of of the questioner but also for the benefit of all future searchers of the archive. That means that its not finished if you have solved the problem for yourself. You still need to ensure that the thread has a complete solution. (For that reason its also important to give a meaningful subject to each post.) "Commented" and "minimal" also reduce the time it takes to understand the problem. Don't just dump your code as is into the message since you are just wasting your own time. Its not likely anyone will answer a message if the questioner has not taken the time to reduce it to its essential elements. Surprisingly, quite often understanding what the problem is takes the responder most of the time -- not solving the problem. Once the question is actually understood its often quite fast to answer. Thus in addition to posting it in a minimal form, comment on it sufficiently so that the responder knows what the code does and is intended to produce. It may be obvious to the questioner who is embroiled in the problem but that does not mean its obvious to others. Introduction .... rest of posting guide ... ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
