From smckinney at bccrc.ca  Fri Jun  6 22:24:13 2008
From: smckinney at bccrc.ca (Steven McKinney)
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 13:24:13 -0700
Subject: [Rd] Posting Guide
References: <971536df0806061030i75474172xff100ece76a23eec@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <0BE438149FF2254DB4199E2682C8DFEB0328A352@crcmail1.BCCRC.CA>

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: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org 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 ...

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[Rd] Posting Guide
Steven McKinney