Note that R-help is *not* intended for questions that are easily answered by consulting one of the FAQs or other introductory material (see "Do your homework before posting" below). Such questions are actively discouraged and are likely to evoke a brusque response. Questions about seemingly simple matters that are mentioned in the FAQs or other introductory material *are welcomed* on R-help *when the questioner obviously has done their homework and the question is accompanied by an explanation* like "FAQ 7.2.1 seems to be relevant to this but I couldn't understand/apply the answer because ...".
Something like this would make it very clear up front what type of questions are not appropriate. (I'm not trying at all to dictate the policy, but as far as I can tell, the above summaries the attitude of the majority of very knowledgeable helpers that respond to questions on R-help.)
Also, I think that John Maindonald's idea of a "I am new to R, where do I start?" page, with a link from the posting guide, is an excellent idea.
I'm aware that some feel that the posting guide is already too long, but my feeling is that if users don't read a very easily accessible posting guide AND post inappropriate questions AND become offended by brusque responses, then they are beyond where they can easily be helped. The most important thing is to make it very clear what types of questions are and are not considered appropriate, so that beginning users know what they are getting into.
And the following might merit inclusion in the FAQ:
Why is R-help not for hand-holding beginner questions?
R-help is a high traffic list and the general sentiment is that too many very simple questions will overwhelm everyone and most importantly result in the knowledgeable helpers ceasing to participate. The reason that there is no "R-help-me-quickly-I-dont-want-to-read-the-documentation" list is that no-one has felt that it would work well -- it is unlikely that many knowledgeable users of R would be willing to participate. Without such users participating, it is likely that sometimes bad advice would be offered and stand uncorrected, because R is a complex language with many ways of doing things, some markedly inferior to others. For these reasons, some feel it would be a very bad idea to create such a list. (However, anyone who believes otherwise and wishes to start and maintain such a list or other similar service is free to do so.) One reason for this overall state of affairs is that R is free software and consequently there is no revenue stream to support a hand-holding support service with paid employees. So although the actual software is free, some investment in terms of time spent reading documentation is required in order to use it. Furthermore, many of the frequent helpers on R-help have written introductory documents intended to help beginners with many aspects of learning and using R (e.g., "An Introduction to R", and the various FAQs). Consequently they sometimes get fed up getting asked again and again the same question they have already written a document to explain. Nonetheless, the general sentiment on R-help is very helpful -- a quote summarizes it well: "It's OK if you need some spoonfeeding (I need that quite often myself), but at least show how you have tried to use the spoon yourself, instead of just showing us your open mouth." [Attribution to Andy Liaw, or remain anonymous?]
As some feel that sufficient time and bandwidth has already been spent on this issue, if anyone has any comments on this particular matter of an addition to the posting guide (or FAQ), feel free to choose to respond to me privately, and I will summarize as appropriate.
-- Tony Plate
______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
