answering questions is an opportunity to improve our community

[Oliver Beckstein]

Hi Devs,

As you know, we discourage asking of questions in the issue tracker. Our templates explicitly say so and redirect people to the mailing list (and probably should mention discord). The reason is that we want to keep the issue tracker focused and reduce what is noise in the context of what we use the tracker for: keeping track of bugs in code and docs and discussing new features. I believe that we should explain the rules of our community to new users and we can reasonably expect them to be followed.

All core developers have the power to close issues. I started making use of this privilege when encountering clear “question” issues. I tag them (if we need to look at them again in aggregrate), write a friendly explanatory message (see below), and then close it. I hope that this does not alienate users. I try to be aware of follow-up questions from issues that I close and reply to them so that I can show the user that we are following through and not just trying to get rid of pesky questions.

Users can have a reasonable expectation that we actually acknowledge their communications and try to help. (This is also a point that Alan Grossfield makes in his “How to be a good member of a scientific software community “ https://doi.org/10.33011/livecoms.3.1.1473 .)

And my feeling is that we’re not doing so great on that measure. On the user list there were 29 threads since Apr 27, but 10 did not get a single answer — either from one of the developers or another user. I haven’t looked in detail into discord (which is messier). People also ask on Stack Overflow — I am not a fan because rarely do I find enough information in the question to answer it but I suppose showing up on S/O indicates that MDAnalysis is used so widely that it’s becoming just part of the ecosystem. Still, I try to help, because frankly, a S/O post on MDA without an answer looks kind of bad.

I’d really like to encourage you all to spend a few minutes to check in on the user list (and discord) and see how you can engage with the wider community. If the question is not clear: say at least that. If you only have half-of-an-idea how to solve the problem: at least offer that. But don’t let people who want to engage with us shout into the ether and wait for an echo — that’s a big, missed opportunity, and that’s not good for the long-term health of the project.

Best,
Oliver


Standard message when closing a question issue:
Hello @USER, could you please ask your questions either on the user mailing list or in our discord — see https://www.mdanalysis.org/#participating for links?

We try to keep the issue tracker focused on issues related to the code and the docs. If you feel that you're running into a short-coming in the documentation then please raise an issue. If you follow the issue template then that will help us better to address the problem.

Thank you.


--
Oliver Beckstein (he/his/him)

email: orbe...@mdanalysis.org
twitter: @orbeckst
GitHub: @orbeckst

MDAnalysis – a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project
https://www.mdanalysis.org/

[orbeckst]

Hello Developers,

You're the folks who know MDAnalysis (and more generally, scientific programming and data analysis) well. You're all experts in some area. YOU are the folks who can help others easily.

Looking at the user mailing list https://groups.google.com/g/mdnalysis-discussion/ there are questions that have no answers or it was just Hugo, Irfan, or lately I who answered. I know there are many more than three (!) people who are qualified to answer questions. MDAnalysis has grown into quite a large community and we can make this community even better by just helping each other a little bit.

So if you are Core Developer or actively developing code then I suggest two things:

1) Make sure that you are subscribed to the user list https://groups.google.com/g/mdnalysis-discussion, because in this way you actually learn what users do with the code that you wrote and how they learn from the docs you crafted.

2) Strive to answer one question per week. That's 5 minutes of your time in a week.

It's not a lot by any measure. But if enough people do it, it will markedly improve our community, lead to more vibrant and multi-angled discussions, and encourage everyone to help each other.

Thanks for reading. I hope you too will answer one question a week!

Oliver