I've placed a revision of the posting guide at
http://pws.prserv.net/tap/posting-guide-draft2.html. (Posted there to make the
HTML formatting easy to read.) I've tried to incorporate the suggestions
people posted and mailed to me. Quite a few were of the form "too long,
but you should add this..." :-)
Brian Ripley, Jason Turner, Peter Dalgard, Patrick Burns, Frank Harrell, Gabor
Grothendieck, Spencer Graves, and Patrick Connolly all made valuable suggestions
that I've tried to incorporate (apologies if I omitted anyone!) Jonathan
Baron gave some much appreciated suggestions on how to make it more concise,
which I have probably not heeded as much as I should have. I did try to put the
more important material at the top of the document.
Suggestions and comments on the revised version are welcome -- deletions,
additions, corrections, changes all considered. In the absence of such, I'm
pretty much ready to hand this over to the R-project.org site maintainers for
posting (let me know if there are any formatting changes needed to make it easy
to use there.)
Based on the widely held fear that posters won't read a long document before
posting, this guide should probably go on its own page at r-project.org (which
might help prevent it getting lost as part of a larger document). One way to
make this information readily visible and accessible would be to have the mail
software place an additional line at the bottom of every post, something like
"Read the <posting guide> before posting here". Several
correspondents liked this idea. Is this desirable and/or doable?
thanks for all the assistance,
Tony Plate
