User support on distance-sampling list
Len Thomas
Dear distance-sampling list,
We want to share an update about how user support will work going forward.
Over many years, we’ve been pleased to provide comprehensive support and to hear about the many interesting challenges and applications from our user community. Your questions, ideas, and experiences have helped shape the development of our tools and have been a valuable part of the project.
Going forward, we will have more limited capacity for support. We would therefore like to transition into a more community-supported model for many day-to-day questions. We encourage users to help one another on this list with guidance on basic methods, troubleshooting, and practical workflows. This community has a tremendous amount of collective expertise, and we encourage you to get involved sharing your knowledge.
Our team will continue to be involved, with a greater focus on addressing more novel or complex questions and on supporting users of the R packages. We will also be gradually moving away from providing support for Distance for Windows. As part of this transition, we encourage community members to share advice and experiences on the transition from Distance for Windows to our R-based tools, which have a greater range of functionality and are actively supported with regular CRAN releases.
If you have an issue with the software, here are a few suggestions for how to resolve it:
- Check the help! (Especially for Distance for Windows, there is an extensive user manual)
- For the R packages, there is an extensive set of examples ("vignettes") - these are collected on one page at https://distancesampling.org/resources/vignettes.html
- Check the archives of this list - it's searchable at https://groups.google.com/g/distance-sampling
- If you think you found a bug, or have a suggestion for an extension, some advice about how to report it is at https://distancesampling.org/software/bug_reporting.html
- If it's potentially an issue you think other users should know about, feel free to post about it to this Group. Feel free also to post if you are looking for advice about how best to achieve something with the software.
We are very appreciative of the active community that has grown around these tools, and we look forward to continuing to support the project together in this next phase.
With best wishes to all, Len Thomas for the St Andrews Distance Development Team
-- Len Thomas (he/him) len.t...@st-andrews.ac.uk lenthomas.org @len_thom Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling and School of Mathematics and Statistics The Observatory, University of St Andrews, Scotland KY16 9LZ Office: UK+1334-461801 Admin: UK+1334-461842 While I may be sending this email outside of my normal office hours, I have no expectation to receive a reply outside of yours. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013532.