Hi,
So CodersCrowd looks like a pretty neat tool. But here what we are
trying to accomplish is something that is less ambitious. Basically
there are a host of problems that crop up from using a mailing list at
the scale that we currently use the main bioconductor mailing list. And
here we are hoping that our new support site will help out with some of
them. To give you an idea about what we were thinking here I will list
just a few of these problems (in no particular order):
1 - Scale: With 3500 subscribers to the bioconductor mailing list,
there is a lot of traffic. This means that a lot of people will either
only guess post or they will post and then immediately unsubscribe.
This basically means that a lot of the people who could most make use of
this information are currently having trouble getting access to it.
Having a web site means that we can make sure these questions (and their
answers) are easily search able and can be read by anyone. The other
side of this change is that if you are carefully answering questions,
that your well earned reputation and your careful answers should now
find a wider audience.
2 - Repetition: A lot of times the same questions get asked over and
over again. This is bad for everyone, but is especially annoying for
our package authors who sometimes have to spend a lot of their time
answering the similar questions over and over again. Our hope is that
by capturing your responses into a search able format the 1st time more
users will be able to discover your hard work and thus benefit from it
later on.
3 - Mistakes: Sometimes some spam or something embarrassing will get
through. And with mailing lists everything that happens is written in
permanent ink. We would rather that we were able to delete spam from
the public record and that when appropriate you were able to amend
statements so that they better reflected what you intended. It's also
our hope that by amending your answers to questions, you can keep your
answers current instead of crafting new responses from scratch each time.
Anyhow, those are just some of the problems that we were hoping to
address. I hope that the new site helps with these.
Marc
On 08/18/2014 03:56 PM, Aniba, Radhouane wrote:
Hi Marc,
I am a bit surprised to see that move to a biostars-like website ? Why another
QA website ?
Why don't you consider a sandbox like website like CodersCrowd that has already
a docker image of R and Bioconductor where users can reproduce their bugs ?
Just saying ...
R & Bioconductor is more a deep programming problem solving kind of
interactions, and so should be the support for it, not just a copy and paste (fork)
of biostars ( I have nothing against biostars btw)
That's my personal opinion of course :)
Rad
On Aug 18, 2014, at 12:15 PM, Marc Carlson <mcarl...@fhcrc.org> wrote:
Hello!
This is a message to announce the beta test for our new support site.
We hope to replace the regular Bioconductor mailing list with this
site soon and we have imported the past 11+ years of mailing list
discussion into this new site. If you would like to help us test it
out you can do that by logging in here:
https://support.bioconductor.org
For those of you who have posted to the bioconductor mailing list
before, you will probably want to recover your well earned reputation
from previous posts and answers. To do that you will need to scroll
to the bottom of the log in page and click the link that says 'Forgot
Password?'. This should get you started with your mailing list email
address which will already be linked to your previous posts.
And if you have never posted, then you can start a new account from
that same page.
As you explore the beta, you may come across things that you would
like to see changed or that you feel are not working right. This site
is based on a fork of Biostars, and we ask that you please post such
questions to our github repository for this:
https://github.com/Bioconductor/support.bioconductor.org/issues
We aspire to switch over to this new site in early September, but we are
leaving the schedule flexible depending on how well the beta site
works. Also: please note that posts made to the new site during the
beta will dissappear after the test period. We want you to help us
test it, but this is not the live deployment phase quite yet.
I expect there will probably be some other questions about this big
transition. So please ask them as needed and we will try to answer
them the best we can.
Marc
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