Greetings all, On behalf of The R Foundation for Statistical Computing, this is an announcement that, effective October 15, 2015, the Nabble online forums will no longer be a supported vehicle for posting new threads and/or replying to existing threads on R-Help.
This decision was not made lightly and is the result of issues that have developed over the past several years. These issues include: 1. The lack of any context for thread-replies in posts submitted via Nabble. This compels readers to take extra time to click on a link in the post and visit the Nabble web site to read the reply in context. Many email-based R-Help users do not take the time to do this, and therefore do not reply to Nabble-based posts. 2. The use of Nabble by a number of folks who have not subscribed to the R email lists directly. Since subscriptions to the R email lists are required for posting, these posts are held for moderation, which results in a substantial increase in the workload of the **volunteer** list moderators. The moderators must take additional time to log into the administrative web site interfaces for the R lists to manually review, and approve or reject, posts submitted via Nabble. 3. An increasing level of both publicly and privately expressed animosity and frustration on the R lists towards Nabble-based posts because of the above and related issues. Over the past several months, the R Foundation, in cooperation with Nabble, has incrementally removed the ability of multiple Nabble archives to post new threads on the R email lists, respond to existing threads, and privately reply to authors via the Nabble web site. R-Help, because it is the highest volume of the R lists, is the last R email list to undergo this transition. We are announcing the change two weeks in advance to afford Nabble users the opportunity to directly subscribe to and use the R email-based support lists in the manner originally intended. Information on the various R email lists, including R-Help, is available here: https://www.r-project.org/mail.html The existing relevant Nabble archives will become just that -- read only and searchable archives -- as a valuable alternative to other R email list archives that are available online. We wish to express our sincere thanks to Hugo Teixeira at Nabble for his assistance over the past several months in this process. For those folks who prefer to use a web-based interface for R-related support matters, as opposed to email-based interactions, StackOverflow, as one example, provides such a vehicle at: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r For those who have general statistical support queries, as per the R Posting Guide, StackExchange/Cross Validated at: http://stats.stackexchange.com provides a similar platform. The R Foundation does not support or endorse the above third-party resources, but is simply mentioning them as popular, web-based alternatives to the R email lists, which remain our recommended vehicles for focused community support for R. Thank you, Marc Schwartz On Behalf of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
