[R] revision of posting guide

[Tony Plate]

I've placed a revision of the posting guide at http://pws.prserv.net/tap/posting-guide-draft2.html. (Posted there to make the HTML formatting easy to read.)  I've tried to incorporate the suggestions people posted and mailed to me.  Quite a few were of the form "too long, but you should add this..." :-)

Brian Ripley, Jason Turner, Peter Dalgard, Patrick Burns, Frank Harrell, Gabor Grothendieck, Spencer Graves, and Patrick Connolly all made valuable suggestions that I've tried to incorporate (apologies if I omitted anyone!)  Jonathan Baron gave some much appreciated suggestions on how to make it more concise, which I have probably not heeded as much as I should have.  I did try to put the more important material at the top of the document.

Suggestions and comments on the revised version are welcome -- deletions, additions, corrections, changes all considered.  In the absence of such, I'm pretty much ready to hand this over to the R-project.org site maintainers for posting (let me know if there are any formatting changes needed to make it easy to use there.)  

Based on the widely held fear that posters won't read a long document before posting, this guide should probably go on its own page at r-project.org (which might help prevent it getting lost as part of a larger document).  One way to make this information readily visible and accessible would be to have the mail software place an additional line at the bottom of every post, something like "Read the <posting guide> before posting here".  Several correspondents liked this idea.  Is this desirable and/or doable?

thanks for all the assistance,

Tony Plate