Guidelines to request help with RevBayes

[Michael Landis]

This post is meant for researchers who'd like help using RevBayes, such as help specifying new models or resolving errors in existing scripts. There are people here who want to help you, but please make it easy for us to do so. Here are some ways to quickly receive quality assistance.

Before requesting help, please familiarize yourself with the RevBayes tutorial library: http://revbayes.github.io/tutorials.

The tutorials contain rich explanations of the current models and features in RevBayes, accompanied by working code snippets and complete analysis scripts. We've invested a lot of time writing and "debugging" these tutorials for teaching workshops, so they'll typically be of higher quality than responses written on this forum (often written hastily when time allows). 

When requesting help please

    (1) Create new posts to discuss new issues.

    (2) Keep questions or remarks brief and specific, and accompanied by some sort of desired outcome.

    (3) When applicable, provide minimal, complete, and verifiable examples (MCVEs) of problematic code. StackOverflow provides an excellent overview for how to create an MCVE for your issue: https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve

Examples should include

    * a description of the specific problem encountered

    * the fewest lines of code necessary to reproduce the problem

    * the datasets/input used to produce the problem

    * the version (or commit) that is printed in the welcome prompt for your installation of RevBayes

Finally, examples should be easy to access. Attaching downloadable documents to forum posts or using GitHub Gist are splendid options.

Here's an example of an MCVE (can you spot the problem?):

https://gist.github.com/mlandis/44096c6ebaa7f14e3685a31c518a57ee

Merry modeling!

The RevBayes team