Forum:Site Use Guidelines

Question

[Istvan Albert]

Here are a few guidelines:

1. The site's goal is to answer bioinformatics and systems biology related questions
2. Answer questions to gain reputation.
3. Don't forget to vote for answers that you like! Registered users may vote on answers.
4. If you are the one asking the original question you may also select the best answer
5. Subscribe to the RSS feeds for all questions or a single question to keep up to date with the developments

[Jim]

Are bioinfromatics programming questions okay? I am a user of StackOverlflow, but thought programming questions specific to Labatory Information Management Systems (LIMS) might be more appropriate here. Or is there another site that would be better?

[Istvan Albert]

Bioinformatics programming questions are most certainly okay.

Answer 1

[Biostar User]

If you are shy about asking the question on your own behalf submit it to to the Question Bot and it will be posted anonymously. Send email to the Question Bot link at the bottom.

Answer 2

[djinn]

Who is running this site?

[Istvan Albert]

This site has been started by a Bionformatics group at Pennsylvania State University. See bottom of the page for a contact link. Thanks.

Answer 3

[Nicojo]

This is an excellent initiative: congratulations and thank you for setting it up!

I guess this site will be all the more useful as there are more contributors... So I guess that good questions for the administrator(s) of this site are:

• Do you have a plan for advertising this site/attracting new Users?
• How can the Users help?

[Istvan Albert]

Community building starts our very slowly but once it picks up steam it can really blossom. I do think that bioinformatics is particularly well suited for this question-answer type format. I am very pleased to see an influx of new users to the system. I have actually already learned a tremendous amount from the answers here. More than anything that motivates me to promote this site in a more visible manner. Users can help by posting questions and answers, and if you see an interesting question answered somewhere else you may want to post it here as well

Answer 4

[Zhaorong]

Hi,

I don't think a new user can vote on a question or an answer.

The site says I need 15 reputation...

[Istvan Albert]

I see, then I guess they will need to contribute first in some way to gain some reputation first. ✭

Answer 5

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

The StackExchange websites have been designed for making questions related to programming and technical issues.

For example, for this reason, if you try to write a question which starts with 'What is your favorite experience...' you get a disclaimer saying that 'your question seems to be probably subjective and it is likely to be closed'.

However, I think that it is very useful to make subjective and opinion-based questions on bioinformatics, as there are few places to do so... So, what is your policy? Will you accept subjective questions?

[Istvan Albert]

for now we don't want to police questions too strictly, usually all questions are fine unless they are spam or obvious trolling