My Post Doesn't Have a Response - Advice on increasing the chances of getting help with my coding question

[EeethB]

I'm pretty new to the forum, and I've been trying to learn best practices as quickly as I can, so please direct me if this is not the right place for this question.

I am wondering what can be done to help a post get more traffic and hopefully an answer. I made a post here about an issue I'm having with shiny, and it has been viewed some, but there have been no replies. I have waited a few

...days, not hours...

and I included a reprex and a (I think) clear problem statement. So my questions are:

1. What do I do if my post on here never gets answered (I don't have an SO account or anything similar to cross-post on)?
2. Am I just being impatient looking for more options after only three days?

[andresrcs]

From what I have seen here, the most you simplify your issue and the smaller your reprex is, the greater are your chances of getting help.
If your topic is getting some views but no answers (or at least requests for clarification), it is an indication that your topic is still too convoluted and you need to work a little harder to simplify it, or maybe split your issue into smaller, simpler questions.

[EconomiCurtis]

Sorry your problem here hasn't gotten any replies. For me anyway, I love the mix of glee (and a little guilt) when people help solve my coding problems for free online. And it feels great to help too. Also related, this xkcd.

You hit several of the points we'd want to make on how to generally improve the chances your post gets good answers. But to sum up a few,

Make it easy for people to reproduce your problem - minimal reprexes of your issue make it very easy for someone to come in cold, reproduce your issue, and start applying their knowledge and experience to solving it. The harder it is to understand or replicate your issue, the less likely anyone will put in the effort to help.

The simplier the question the more likely it is to get an answer.
Simple reprexes can be quite complex or inchoate issues. This is a particular pain point for Shiny problems. I'd venture a guess that 1/3-1/2 of problems tagged with shiny aren't really issues with shiny, but with R or something that Shiny is calling. But it'll get posted to shiny because it is diffucult to pull out the problematic code.

The community.RStudio.com/faq page has a number of guides for debugging code (including shiny apps, Shiny debugging and reprex guide), and creating good questions. And people who create tools for Shiny put a lot of effort into make the docs are useful as possible.

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Sadly for your example question, I think it might be a good question that needs to reach a niche audience.

We do ask that people not to cross-post. And if you do want to post elsewhere, to wait some time and cite the other posts.. I feel three days is long enough to wait to post to Stack Overflow or twitter.

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Specific to your example, Possible bug when combining renderCachedPlot() with an actionButton(), I did find the set-up of this question a little confusing. The title sets it up as a possible bug report, but then top of the text sets up two problems on code-speed, but then app and final clarifying paragraph focuses on getting the actionButton and caching features you desire. So in this example, you might benefit from a post specific to one of these questions.

[EeethB]

Thanks so much for your feedback! I love the kindness and friendliness of this community and am excited to be a part of it. I will evaluate my post and see how I can make it simpler and more clear.

On the note of the bug report, if I do think there is a bug, is this the place to report it? I've seen some people directed to the github page, but I do not have an account with them.

[andresrcs]

This is just my personal opinion, if you are not sure if it is a bug or just a mistake on your part, then this is the place to start (for RStudio related packages), but once you get confirmation that it is actually a bug, then GitHub is the right place to formally file an issue and get attention from the right people, just make sure to follow their guides to do it properly (which you could find on the Github repo).