Welcome to forum.posit.co — we’re glad to have you! This welcome page will give you some advice on how to get the most out of the site if you’re getting or giving help. We want this to be a friendly, inclusive community. Please read our FAQ which contains some advice aimed at ensuring that this remains a place for civilised discussion.
Getting help
If you need help, your job is to make it as easy as possible for others to help you. If you’re having problems with code the most important thing to do is create a minimal reproducible example, or reprex for short. If you’ve never heard of reprexes before, please start at http://www.tidyverse.org/help/#reprex.
If you have code that runs but doesn’t give the right answer, do your best to clearly state what you expected to see. A quick sketch can often be hugely helpful.
Even if you don’t know exactly what you want, a reprex is still helpful - you can use it to sketch out your data and give helpers a running start.
Sometimes it can be hard to make a good reprex. That’s ok! Don’t let it stop you from asking a question — just be prepared to work on feedback on your reprex before you get substantive help on your problem.
Giving help
When giving help, your job is to put yourself in the shoes of the person having the problem. It’s really frustrating when something goes wrong, and it can be hard to ask help. A little empathy goes a long way!
Don’t think that because you’re new to R that you can’t help answering questions. You might feel like you don’t know much about R in general, but you may know enough to answer one question. And even if you don’t know the answer, you can help out by making a better reprex.
It can be frustrating to answer the same problem that you’ve already seen hundreds of times before. Remember: just because it isn't new to you, it doesn’t mean that it’s not new to other people. If you're tired of talking about X, sit this one out or think strategically about how to make it less of a problem. Please don’t take out your frustration on the person asking the question.
Accepting help
Please remember to mark the answer, which solves your particular challenge. It makes it a lot easier for future help seekers to quickly identify the correct answer in what potentially can be a long thread with numerous iterations of the challenge. This will make the forum much more attractive for future users and the more we are to help, the better.