News FeedFirst off - welcome to BioinformaticsOnline. We hope that you decide to join this community and use this site to discuss all things Bioinformatics (and some things not quite Bioinformatics too)!
As with all community sites, we have some general groundrules and guidelines for the use of this site, please could we stick to them and keep this a happy place.
Posting News/Jobs and Events
When posting to the site with details of news, please use the "story" content type, for event notifications (i.e. conferences) please use the "events" content type, and for job or studentship adverts, please use the "job/phd" content type.
The only real rules that we have for these sections of the site are that the posts submitted are properly formatted (you can check your post before submitting by using the "preview" feature), are legible, and do not contain any illegal, copyrighted or offensive content.
Posting Comments
This one is simple - please keep your comments on-topic, non-offensive and as legible as possible.
Using The Forums
When you need help and wish to ask someone for assistance, or want to post a reply to someone's cry for help, or even just chat about something random, please bear in mind the following thoughts when using the forums:
Asking questions...
- Before posting a question, please make sure that you have at least attempted to solve the problem yourself. Google and the internet are a wonderful resource - as are any manuals that may have come with a software package. This will reduce the need for any RTFM / STFW / UTFG type responses...
- Similarly, before posting a question - try searching the site (using the rather useful 'Search' features available) to see if something similar to your problem has popped up before...
- Make your questions polite, legible and concise. We're not expecting works of literary genius here, but if you explain your problem clearly and precisely, you will get a much quicker response than someone posting 'it's broke - fix it!' without explaining what is broken...
- If your problem is a question about programming - in particular a program you have written, please provide the source code for your program - either by pasting it into the post window (PLEASE surround it with <code> or <blockcode> tags), or by adding it as an attachment to the post. If the program has a file extension that is not allowed on the forum for security reasons, (i.e. Perl scripts), simply put all of your scripts in a .zip file and attach the zip file. Alternatively, you could change all of the file extensions to '.txt' then attach the files, but please state what the original file extension should be! (The .zip option is preferable).
- One final note about programming problems and code... If you are going to post code - please make sure that it is neatly formatted and has at least some commenting to explain your train of thought as your were writing the code. There are many different styles of code formatting that different people use. We have no preference here, just please try and keep things consistent in each individual script/program - using several different coding styles in one program does not make for easy reading.
Replying to questions...
- As with the people asking the questions, please keep things polite, legible and concise. How is the person asking the question supposed to interpret your reply if it is written in base64 encoded geek talk or binary?!?!
- Finally, if the person asking the questions has not done their homework, (i.e. searching the forum, internet and at least trying Google) before posting a question - please use the following procedure... For a first offense, please refer them to this page. Second offense, use of terminology such as RTFM / STFW / UTFG is allowed. Third offense, report them to a site administrator so that they can be contacted and delt with accordingly. ;)
Posts in general...
- As with both of the above sections - let's keep things as nice, polite and friendly as possible. We want people to get along. If you do want to have a rant and a rave about something - please use the 'Ranting' section of the forum to vent your frustrations.
- Use common sense - please let's not have anything offensive, illegal or what could be considered liable on this forum. It's taken a long time to build this site into what it is today, it would be a shame to have to limit or over-moderate things.