Forum question posting guideline

General
4

Here’s the draft. Comments? Suggestions?

How to ask a good question?

We understand you are busy and need answer ASAP, and we’d love to help you. Here are some tips to improve your probability of getting an answer.

Please be polite

First and foremost, manners matter, use magic words! (here’s our code of conduct).

Search

Please search on Discourse or google first. Don’t ignore relevant posts that do not directly answer your question. Share what your find in the post.

Minimal working example

If you are reporting issues with a model or code, please don’t paste the entire program or output. Instead, try to reproduce the issue with an example that is as simple as possible. If the problem can only be reproduced with certain data, please attach that too. In other words, please make your example complete so that we can run it on our end.

Make it reproducible

Please follow category templates if provided. For code snippets and math expressions, use markdown (it takes only minutes to learn) and preview them before posting. Please stay away from plain texts, please absolutely stay away from screenshots.

In addition, detailed information about your working environment goes a long way. Depends on the question, there are tools to help you to achieve that.

  • For R users…
    Please use reprex for nicely formatted code snippets. We recommend include session information as

    reprex(..., session_info=TRUE)

  • For python users…
    reprex has been ported to python. If possible please use reprexpy generated markdown with working environment information.

  • For c++ users…
    If you are running into problems with c++ compilation or cmdstan, please attach information of platform, compiler, and relevant error messages.

  • For Stan users (remember why you are here?)
    Most important of all, please provide the version of Stan and Stan interface you are using. This can be retrieved from cmdstanpy.show_versions() or cmdstanr::cmdstan_version(). If only “.csv” files are available, one can retrieve Stan version from the first a few lines:

    grep "version" output.csv

Pitch it!

The forum relies on volunteers with limited contribution window, so it helps if the question is phased like a one-minute pitch, with relevant details highlighted while noise minimized. For example,

  • Title
    Instead of “model fails to build”, a title “Error in compileCode function when building model on windows” is much more informative.
  • Category
    Instead of in category “general”, a question on cmdstanr has better visibility to relevant developers when in “interface”.
  • Tags
    Choose or create tags for your question, as specific as possible.
  • Summarize
    What is the issue? What is the error message? What have I tried but didn’t work? Summarize your problem before showing any code, or math.
  • Relevance
    We welcome stat & R discussions but we will have to prioritize Stan-related questions.

Be prepared for questions

Research rarely has straight answers, please be prepared for questions and feedback. We appreciate inspiring questions, but the broader the scope, the more iterations and longer the discussion. Be ready to engage, and manage your expectation. Also, please keep an open mind: it’s much more likely that a terse comment results from someone being busy rather than rude.

EDIT: updated per @spinkney & @Bob_Carpenter s comment.
EDIT: update per @syclik comment, thanks!

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