[R] creating an equivalent of r-help on r.stackexchange.com ?

Mon Feb 3 22:49:51 CET 2014

Ditto. And ditto. And (by the way -- no-one seems to have mentioned it)
what are the possibilities, for mail appearing on something like Stack
Exchange, of having the mail sent to oneself so that it can be stored
locally, on one's own machine? That is the only way I would want to
work -- anything interesting is sitting in my disk, I can edit it if
I wish, I can make local copies, etc. etc. etc. etc. Anything which is
not interesting gets deleted (though I can always dig into R-help
archives if need be).

Best wishes,
Ted.

On 03-Feb-2014 21:36:21 Rolf Turner wrote:
> 
> For what it's worth, I would like to say that I concur completely with 
> Don and Bert.  (Also I would like second Bert's vote of thanks to Don 
> for expressing the position so clearly.)
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Rolf Turner
> 
> On 04/02/14 09:56, Bert Gunter wrote:
>> Don:
>>
>> First, I apologize if this is off topic, but I thought I should reply
>> publicly.
>>
>> I would only like to say thank you for so eloquently and elegantly
>> summarizing my views, also. Maybe that makes me a dinosaur. If so, I
>> happily accept the label.
>>
>> I find SO's voting for posting business especially irritating. I wish
>> merely to post or to read the posts of others without being subjected
>> to some kind of online pseudo game and ratings competition. That alone
>> keeps me away. But Don said it better.
>>
>> I realize that I may be out of step with the masses here, and the
>> masses should certainly decide. Hopefully I won't be around if/when
>> they decide that R-help should go.
>>
>> Best,
>> Bert
>>
>> Bert Gunter
>> Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics
>> (650) 467-7374
>>
>> "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge
>> is certainly not wisdom."
>> H. Gilbert Welch
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:42 PM, MacQueen, Don <macqueen1 at llnl.gov> wrote:
>>> Every browser-based interface I've ever seen has a number of features that
>>> I find to be huge deterrents. To mention just two:
>>>
>>> - They waste copious amounts of screen space on irrelevant things such as
>>> "votes", the number of views, the elapsed time since something or other
>>> happened, fancy web-page headers, and so on. Oh, and advertisements. The
>>> Mathematica stackexchange example given in a link in one of the emails
>>> below (http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) illustrates these
>>> shortcomings -- and it's not the worst such example.
>>>
>>> - In most if not all cases, one has to login before posting. I have too
>>> many usernames and passwords as it is.
>>>
>>> Right now, at this very moment, in my email client's window I can see and
>>> browse the subject lines of 20 threads in r-help. And that's using only
>>> about half of my screens vertical space. In contrast, in the Mathematica
>>> stackexchange example, I can see at most 10, and that only by using the
>>> entire vertical space of my screen. The "From" column in my email client
>>> shows the names of several of the people contributing to the thread, which
>>> the browser interface does not. In the email client, I can move through
>>> messages, and between messages in a thread using my keyboard. In a
>>> browser, I have to do lots of mousing and clicking, which is much less
>>> efficient.
>>>
>>> As it is now, r-help messages come to me. I don't have to start up a
>>> browser. So it's much easier to go take a quick look at what's new at any
>>> time.
>>>
>>> True, I had to subscribe to the mailing list, which involves a username
>>> and password. But once it's done, it's done. I don't have to login before
>>> posting, which means I don't have to remember yet another username and
>>> password.
>>>
>>> What "...duplicated efforts of monitoring multiple mailing lists)"? I have
>>> no duplicated effort...in fact, I have almost no effort at all, since the
>>> messages come to me. There was some initial setup, i.e., to filter
>>> different r-* messages to different mailboxes in my email client, but now
>>> that that's done, it's as simple as clicking on the correct mailbox.
>>>
>>> In other words, in every way that's important to me, the mailing list
>>> approach is superior. I do not support abandoning the mailing list system
>>> for any alternative.
>>>
>>> -Don
>>>
>>> --
>>> Don MacQueen
>>>
>>> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
>>> 7000 East Ave., L-627
>>> Livermore, CA 94550
>>> 925-423-1062
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2/2/14 1:49 PM, "Liviu Andronic" <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Duncan,
>>>> I discovered something interesting wrt to the licensing and mirroring
>>>> of user-contributed material on StackExchange.  Please read below.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch
>>>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> I'm not aware of a discussion on this, but I would say no.
>>>>>> Fragmentation is bad. Further fragmentation is worse.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> TL;DR
>>>>>> =====
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Actually I'd say all mailing lists except r-devel should be moving to
>>>>>> StackOverlow in the future (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with it).
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I would generally agree with you, except for a few points.
>>>>>
>>>>> 1.  I avoid StackOverflow, because they claim copyright on the
>>>>> compilation.
>>>>> As I read their terms of service, it would be illegal for anyone to
>>>>> download
>>>>> and duplicate all postings about R.  So a posting there is only
>>>>> available as
>>>>> long as they choose to make it available. Postings to the mailing list
>>>>> are
>>>>> archived in several places.
>>>>>
>>>> It seems that StackOverflow is officially proposing user-generated
>>>> content for download/mirroring:
>>>> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by
>>>> -the-internet-archive/?cb=1
>>>>
>>>> "All community-contributed content on Stack Exchange is licensed under
>>>> the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. " And it is currently being
>>>> mirrored at least at the Internet Archive:
>>>> https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
>>>>
>>>> So, in principle, it would be possible/desirable to:
>>>> - spin the 'r' tag from StackOverflow and propose an r.stackexchange.com
>>>> at
>>>> http://area51.stackexchange.com/categories/8/technology . Such a SE
>>>> site would be similar to http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/
>>>> - involve R Core to give blessing for using the R logo, if necessary.
>>>> This would be similar to what Ubuntu does with AskUbuntu:
>>>> http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/5444/is-ask-ubuntu-official-ubuntu
>>>> - set a mirror on r-project.org for all the user content that is
>>>> produced by r.stackexchange.com , and thus allow R Core to keep the
>>>> info publicly available at all times. The mirroring on Internet
>>>> Archive would still hold.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 2.  I think an interface like StackOverflow is better than the mailing
>>>>> list
>>>>> interface, and will eventually win out.  R-help needs to do nothing,
>>>>> once
>>>>> someone puts together something like StackOverflow that attracts most
>>>>> of the
>>>>> people who give good answers, R-help will just fade away.
>>>>>
>>>> The advantages for such a move are countless (especially wrt to
>>>> efficiently organizing R-related knowledge and directing users to
>>>> appropriate sources of info), so I won't go into that. I would only
>>>> note that most 'r-sig-*' MLs would become obsolete in such a setup,
>>>> and would be replaced by the much more efficient tagging system of the
>>>> SE Q&A web interface (for example, all posts appropriate for r-sig-gui
>>>> would simply be tagged with 'gui'; no need for duplicated efforts of
>>>> monitoring multiple mailing lists).
>>>>
>>>> Opinions?
>>>>
>>>> Liviu
> 
> ______________________________________________
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> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
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-------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at wlandres.net>
Date: 03-Feb-2014  Time: 21:49:47
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