Three New #rstats Twitter Bots To Follow

I engage with the Stack[Overflow|Exchange] community quite a bit and was super-happy @treycausey made the Stack Overflow #rstats bot (@StackOverflowR) since I’m also on Twitter alot (mostly hanging out in #rstats these days).

However, #rstats questions exist in other Stack watering holes, like the Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange. Cross Validated and the fledgling Data Science Stack Exchange. They are all easy enough to follow in your favorite RSS reader (which is @feedly, right?), but it’s also equally as easy to turn them into Twitter #rstats bots (here they are):

• @DataSciSERBot (Data Science Stack Exchange #rstats posts)
• @GISStackExchR (Geographic Information Systems #rstats posts)
• @RStatsStExBot (Cross Validated Stack Exchange #rstats posts)

They use this IFTTT recipe to take the RSS feeds from each Stack community and turn them into tweets. Each forum (and, hence, Twitter bot) has way less volume than @StackOverflowR and also tend to be of less general interest than @StackOverflowR. However, each specialized #rstats question forums [usually] have really interesting problems & answers that I’ve learned a great deal from. You may get inspiration for a solution to something, see a really neat way to accomplish a task, get an idea for a new R package or just gain new and useful knowledge in areas previously unfamiliar to you.

They won’t be spamming the #rstats Twitter channel (the errant #rstats tag on one of the tweets was fixed in the recipe), so you’ll have to follow them or deliberately check in on them to see the updates.

I’ll try to keep an eye out for other Stack communities that feature #rstats and add them to the bot family. If you see any I’ve missed or am missing in the future, drop a comment here or note to @hrbrmstr on Twitter.