Notes for version 1.3.1
A new version of Biostar is now active.
Post closing and deletion has been slightly changed and full rules are as follows. As you can see below the rules always end up more complicated than initially anticipated.
- Any post (question, answer, comment) may be deleted without a trace by the author of the post as long as there are no other posts associated with it (comments, answers). Posts deleted this way cannot be recovered and are not kept in neither in the database nor in the logs.
- A moderator may delete any post. When this happens the post is removed from the public listing of the site. But the post still remains visible to other moderators and it may be restored to full status.
- A regular user may also delete their own post as long as it has only comments associated with it. In that case the post becomes invisible to the user but is still visible to moderators and the rules in point 2 apply. Moderators may restore the post.
- A regular user may not delete their own post if it is has followups such as answers associated with it.
- Regular users may not close their own posts.
Note: Moderators may still close posts, but I would recommend to use the feature sparingly as it appears to have clear negative effects whereas the benefits are less well defined. Post closing may be removed if those persists.
Notes for version 1.3.0
A new version of Biostar has been released today. The major additions are a so called external authentication and better autolinking.
External Authentication
The external authentication allows another authorized web service to create Biostar accounts and post questions with a certain context associated with these. We are evaluating this feature in conjunction with the Galaxy team as a potential way of linking Galaxy users to Biostar accounts and provide user support for those performing data analysis via Galaxy.
Biostar Autolinking
The parser will now recognize links to this site and will generate more meaningful links from them.
For example the url http://www.biostars.org/p/22/ added to a post will be displayed as Gene ID conversion tool. This
works with anchors as well http://www.biostars.org/p/22/#98 will expand to A: Gene ID conversion tool.
The previous style of shortcuts of writing \post 22 has also been kept functional.
The same type of linking works for user pages. Pasting a link to a user page http://www.biostars.org/u/30/ will result in it being displayed as Pierre Lindenbaum.
To disable autolinking wrap the url into inline code or a code block.
Bioinformatics Terms
Certain words such as bwa, SAM, samtools or bedtools are automatically recognized and linked to homepage like so: bwa, SAM, samtools and bedtools.
We started with just a few terms listed above and we are evaluating how well this works in practice.
Gist Embedding
To embed gists you may use a shortcut \gist ialbert/ae46c5f51d63cdf2d0d2 or a full link
https://gist.github.com/ialbert/ae46c5f51d63cdf2d0d2 and each will be displayed as
or as
Youtube Embedding
YouTube embedding works via shortcuts \youtube _cDaX0xJPvI or full url embedding http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cDaX0xJPvI
resulting in
or
syntax highlighting in code blocks have been temporarily disabled due to rendering problems with XML, we will probably replace it with another approach
Good work on the new release. Could the new features be put into a separate answer each to facilitate responses to each point with the 'question' being the summary of the update?
good points, but maybe I will break these down for the next feature release to avoid creating posts with content that most people already read.
Feel free add requests for clarifications below. ll. In the forum section I will rename the answers to post as in this category the Q&A does not apply.
Great work! These are nice improvements as well as the reminder bar at the bottom of posts.
yes that's something we have neglected to clarify and we can't blame people for not knowing
I agree: I always hope things like that would be common sense for people, but I seem to have noted a lot of "comments in the answers section" lately, perhaps because there are so many new users -- which is a great thing. Also, the difference between an answer and a comment can be hazy so I can understand the confusion of some people.
Oh, great--I had trouble with this in the past.
Just curious: is there support for Vimeo or other sources planned too? I see quite a range of hosting choices out there.
yes I should do that too, will add it to the todo list, usually someone needs to ask for a feature to be added ;-)