Do you have an account on the rOpenSci forum? As underlined in our contributing guide, our forum is where we encourage Q&A and exploration of ideas on a various range of topics. Compared to our Slack semi-open workspace, the forum is entirely open and much easier to search, so a great place to gather some collaborative knowledge! We have recently streamlined categories so that it might be easier for you to find where to post, and what to follow. In this post we shall present current forum categories, and ways for you to keep up-to-date with the activity without getting overwhelmed.

Forum categories

First note that forum categories are there to serve users, not the other way round! So if you post in the “wrong” category, no problem! If necessary, we can transfer the post to a more relevant category to make it more visible, but really no harm done!

Package Use Questions

Wonder how to combine images with magick? Or how to update resources with ckanr? Package Use Questions is the category for Q&A on any of our packages.

Wishlist

What if you wish that, or wonder whether, a certain package existed? Post in the Wishlist category!

Package Development

Do you maintain or contribute to an R package, rOpenSci-affiliated or not? You can ask questions in the Package Development category!

General Q&A

The Q&A category is good for asking about any topic related to R, rOpenSci, reproducible and transparent science, etc.

Jobs

The Jobs category welcomes job postings! Please keep your posts limited to jobs that seem like a good fit for our community. That is, jobs relating to software + science.

Use Cases

Use (?) the Use Cases category for reporting examples of how our packages or resources (e.g. our dev guide or contributing guide) have been used in the wild. We then extract use cases as JSON and present them in a nice table on this very website.

Blog

This is the category you’d end up in via the blog itself, as it’s used for commenting!

Code of Conduct

The Code of Conduct category is reserved for transparency reports made by our code of conduct committee.

Meta

The Meta category is the home for questions and ideas related to the forum itself!

Antartic

If you want to discuss R in Antarctic and Southern Ocean science, use the Antartic category!

How to follow the forum?

• Visiting the forum everyday as part of your morning routine might not be exactly doable nor efficient.

• Exploring other topics every time you post a job posting or a package use question might be a great way to informally keep in touch!

• You can subscribe to each category via the bell icon that’s at the top right. Then in your email service you could create a filter to have all emails from the forum arrive in a folder that you’d open when you have time to engage.

• You can add the RSS feed of each category to your feed reader. The link to the RSS feed is the URL to the category plus .rss e.g. https://discuss.ropensci.org/c/package-development/29.rss (but if you copy-paste the URL https://discuss.ropensci.org/c/package-development/29 in e.g. Feedly the actual feed will be found without your help).

• In our semi-open slack workspace, there’s a channel, #discuss-ropensci with all activity from the forum, but that’s probably not optimal for casual forum use.

• Subscribing to our newsletter would mean you indirectly gain information from the forum as we summarized recent use cases, and digest package development tips.

Not forum categories

The following topics used to be forum categories and they’re still there as an archive, but all new discussions have moved.

Discussions about R-universe are encouraged in https://github.com/r-universe-org/bugs/discussions & bug reports to https://github.com/r-universe-org/bugs/issues.

Discussions about statistical software review have moved to https://github.com/ropensci/statistical-software-review-book/discussions.

Conclusion

In this post we presented the new streamlined categories used on our public forum. We hope some are of interest to you and that you’ll take advantage of them and contribute to the conversations!