Discussion vs. Q&A

[11rchitwood]

Is RStudio Community restricted to pure Q&A, like Stack Overflow, for example? Or are open-ended questions allowed?

The mark a solution feature makes me think Q&A is more desirable, but is discussion explicitly forbidden or discouraged?

[martin.R]

I can remember plenty of discussions in the past, but these do seem to have become quite rare lately. Personally I find these more enlightening.

The 'mark a solution' feature is part of the forum software, so I wouldn't take that as a guide.

[11rchitwood]

@martin.R

I can remember plenty of discussions in the past, but these do seem to have become quite rare lately. Personally I find these more enlightening.

I agree. I like asking/reading best practices questions. Even if there isn't a clear answer its nice to see how others tackle a problem.

@martin.R

The 'mark a solution' feature is part of the forum software, so I wouldn't take that as a guide.

I realize now that the forum is based on discourse.org, which is at its core designed for discussion. Seems like open-ended questions may be fine!

[andresrcs]

I think this could fall into the "non-programming-problem-discussions" guideline.

FAQ: Tips for Introducing Non-Programming-Problem Discussions

First and foremost, please ask! A core goal of community is to be a friendly place to chat about topics related to data science, R, and RStudio. We know that posting to technical forums can be intimidating. But know that many here would love to see you overcome your inhibition and engage with us. Here are a few tips some folks here think might be helpful. Title Put extra effort into your title. Be as clear and compelling as possible. For many your title will be the only thing they see before they completely ignore your post Content Besides asking the core of your query, State Your Goals: Some community-members are quite task-oriented here. Stating specific goals for th…

[dcruvolo]

@11rchitwood

Even if there isn't a clear answer its nice to see how others tackle a problem.

I enjoy reading these posts too. Perhaps it's a drawback of the discourse platform or maybe the nature of programming forums in general.

Personally, I wish there was a site that was a mix between dev.to and community.rstudio. Dev.to is great. There's a small R group over there, but it isn't really active.

[technocrat]

I agree that the discussion topics are valuable. I'd like to see a tag to highlight these, maybe General Data Science?

[EconomiCurtis]

Curious if you have any ideas to help make discussions a bigger part of RStudio Community?

Discourse seems to steer people towards the types of threads that are already common. Since we get so many Q&As, we appear to only be a Q&A forum. That, and longer discussions quickly get buried.

I'd love to consider ways for longer-form, more abstract discussions to also do well here.

[technocrat]

A type of question that is common goes not so much to how to use an RStudio product, a tidyverse package or another common package, but to the basic question *how should this type of analysis be approached?"

One example:

Examples of interconnected datasets

Hi everyone, This is the beginning of what I hope will become a very long thread of quality responses from the community. Just like many of you here, I teach some data science with R using the tidyverse. I must say that my favorite datasets to do this are the data in the nycflights13 package, namely: flights, weather, airport, planes and airlines. This is because of how rich they are in terms of size and multiplicity of data types (e.g. numeric, character, date, ...). You can manipulate, join, visualize, hack and slice them in so many interesting ways. I use them to teach: dplyr, ggplot2, tidyr, purrr, lubridate, ... And I am about to start doing some modeling with the data to answer the q…

There was another I can't find on asking for general advice on choice of methods in analysis of a biostatistics or ecology domain type of problem

[andresrcs]

Maybe a "discussions" sub category under #general to include a category description that makes clear that open questions without specific answers are welcome?

[11rchitwood]

I marked the above mention of your FAQ post on Tips for Introducing Non-Programming-Problem Discussions as a solution in this thread.

Specifically, I think the #best-practices and #recommendations tags are the best solution denoting discussions.