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Hi mates,

It seems people are looking for help on their R code quite often, I figured it would be nice to have a common place (1) where we can standardise the way that questions get asked and answered. The first point is that by presenting your problem to someone else, we can avoid our own bias. Furthermore, it is important to ask a coding problem in a coding fashion -- that is, to present a reproducible error with a smallest starting material (e.g: a vector, a matrix, a test dataframe, something simple), instead of a verbal description.

In terms of the context of the question, please keep it to a programming context and avoid asking for help for assignment-specific help.

For example, please ask : "what happened to my for-loop" "why my sapply() is not working?" "BioLite() would not install "blah""

And avoid: "How should I write a Poisson sampler?" "How to use DNACopy?" "What parameter to use for artificial noise?"

Again, the point of the discussion board would be to help get people started with programming, to relieve them from panicking, and to build general knowledge on programming, so that they can focus on the real,biology-related aspect of the problem. After passing this stage, you would probably be capable of feeding yourself with knowledge from stack-overflow. But this transition can be hard, and we hope this can be improved.

Happy coding!
Feng Geng​

• (1) DicussionBoard: https://github.com/compbio-2017/Discussion/issues
• (2) How to write Markdown: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet