This is great! Consider changing the title to something like “Guidelines for asking questions about code” (or something a little simpler).
Cheers,
Kevin
Good idea. I do not even know what PSA refers to here 
I have two suggestions:
- Change the title to “Advice on posting to Julia Discourse”
- The advice (or an improved version) should be a Julia Discourse FAQ.
For more inspiration, here is the link to the equivalent FAQ for Stata:
https://www.statalist.org/forums/help
Update thanks to Google: PSA = Public Service Announcement
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Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t think that a document like the Stata FAQ is what I had in mind, keeping it short was a priority.
My personal addition:
- Be clear about which package you are talking about. A link to the github project repo is a good idea. Don’t assume there is only one package for doing a particular task, and that we will thus know what you mean when you say “the plotting package” or “the Markov Chain Monte Carlo package”. If you have an example following point 3 “Make your example self-contained” you should be fine.
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Thanks for the suggestions. I will wait a while for more and then edit. Another thing I missed is guidance about cross-posting.
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I’d like to add a comment for those seeking to post this in the future - while simply posting the link by itself may have the desired effect, including a sentence about why you’re posting it will be seen as far more friendly and welcoming. Eg:
Welcome to the Julia forums! Just so you know, you might have better luck getting answers if you follow some of these simple guidelines.
Or something.
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Very nice list!
I also had no idea what “PSA” might mean.
I’d especially value the 4th step: Simplify your problem. So I’d move that item to the top!
Also to me it seems like a good idea to pin this topic.
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I would like to thank everyone for the suggestions. I updated the post, mostly minor rewording and highlighting keywords for easier reference.
This is a good suggestion, but I think that the point about MWE should cover this, so I decided not to make the list longer (lest it would not be read).
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We need a deep learning model built with Flux.jl to predict which posts needs this and a bot to auto reply with this.
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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
I currently know how to do the following things:
@discobot start new user
Starts one of the following interactive narratives: new user, advanced user.
@discobot roll 2d6
3, 6
@discobot quote
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you — Princess Diana
@discobot fortune
You may rely on it
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So u r a troll
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I was assuming that the suggestion was the customization of the discobot welcome message to include this post.
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Proposal for an additional point on the list:
You are more likely to receive meaningful help if you avoid most non-standard characters, i.e. characters that are not present on almost all international keyboard layouts. This means de facto sticking to ASCII characters on US layout keyboards, plus some very well-established special cases like ⊻ (infix xor) or ∈ (alias for in). It is rude to expect the international audience on discourse to figure out how to input your native characterset or your not-universally-used symbols (e.g. unicode subscript or superscript, greek characters, accents).
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I don’t necessarily disagree, but want to keep the list short and IMO we don’t see a lot of obfuscated unicode from newbies that often.
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How about adding this?
Include full stacktrace and error messages. They often contain valuable information even if they may seem cryptic to you. Please quote the stacktrace as well (see point 1).