Recommend pieces of information/variables to include in questions?

[mara]

On the code-isn't-working side of things there's reprex, but I'm wondering if there's a list of helpful information that people should include in their questions (e.g. computer system info) that might be included in a dynamic reminder for user's first couple of questions.

Sorry if this is a bit unclear. Basically, I'm coming across questions that say X isn't working, but that don't include R version, package version, OS, etc., and I'm looking for ideas re. how to help new users to know what might help their potential answerers (short of full-blown diagnostics).

I tried to write up a few ways of finding some of these things visually, but obviously the existence of a blog post doesn't make for a solution…
https://maraaverick.rbind.io/2017/10/mousey-methods/

This piece has a good section on Computer Specifications too:

How to find your computer specifications and generate a system report

[dlsweet]

I think another big thing to include is the exact error message that someone is getting. This saves time by allowing the person who would like to help to know the problem if they have faced it before without having to ask a lot of questions to get to the heart of the issue.

[mara]

@dlsweet

I think another big thing to include is the exact error message that someone is getting.

Absolutely! See? This is why we need a list!

[dlsweet]

Yes! All I could think of was this post:

Large csv Census files in tidyverse

I'm trying to put csv files and bind them together to create a large dataset of census data per year. Unfortunately, there comes a point where R can no longer allocate the data (up to 124Mb if I'm not mistaken). So it decides to just stop reading and binding files up to 2010. I've tried using gc() over and over, but it still does not seem to work R version: Microsoft R Open 3.4.1 Rstudio version: Version 1.0.153 Windows version: Windows 10 x64 bit CPU: Intel i3-4005U CPU 1.70GHz RAM: 4GB Here is the code. suppressPackageStartupMessages({ library(dplyr) library(tidyr) library(purrr) library(readr) library(stringr) library(ffbase)}) # Import and filter only household head ca…

There are so many different memory issues that could be occurring and even though the R version, Rstudio version, etc was included it still took a long time to sort out.