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In 10 days we will be celebrating 1 year since the launch of the site!

I think it is a good time to discuss and review how to improve the site, talk about things that are working well and things that do not need to improve. Some of them might have been brought to meta, but reviewing how are we doing with these issues will help too.

The idea is to identify issues to have in mind for the next year, and if needed start a separate question on meta for the issue.

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The only thing that I mind here is that sometimes I see downvoted questions without obvious reason or comment bellow explaining what is wrong with the questions (I tried to search for one question I had in my mind, but I could not find it).

I believe that downvotes are important for answers, but not so useful for questions. We should as community take care that every user who ask "wrong question" figure out what he should ask instead and therefore I think that comments are way more appropriate.

Otherwise I think we are slowly growing and it's just matter of time. In fact Q/day are slowly increasing and of science-related betas we have second highest (we have 3.9 and machine learning had more if I remember correctly).

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  • $\begingroup$ I think I am the one to blame on the downvotes on questions, but I usually leave a comment (I think), however I don't see many questions with a negative score. In general what I feel is the opposite, some questions receive upvotes without showing the research effort, but that's the beauty of communities with different people :D $\endgroup$
    – llrs
    May 11, 2018 at 11:08
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    $\begingroup$ I will try to link all the cases of downvoted not commented questions to chat from now on. I just don't find downvote to be really effective in delivering the message "you need to rephrase/improve you question", I find commenting + temporary closing way more firendly for users and the same for community (to separate good and not-sufficient questions). $\endgroup$
    – Kamil S Jaron
    May 11, 2018 at 11:55
  • $\begingroup$ Now that I downvoted and was leaving without a comment. If I find a question not useful and with lack of research, should I also leave a message? $\endgroup$
    – llrs
    May 14, 2018 at 16:07
  • $\begingroup$ If it would be obvious for OP how he should ask he would probably do it. So I think in any case you should leave the comment $\endgroup$
    – Kamil S Jaron
    May 14, 2018 at 21:24
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with this answer, I see too many downvoted questions. If I was a new user and get a downvote, I would leave here and go to biostars. I thought downvotes were especially meaningful for answers... $\endgroup$
    – benn
    Aug 14, 2018 at 7:16
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First (bigger) issue is the low number of question we have. We (barely?) made to the public beta phase with a warning regarding this issue.

There are other communities with more traction and older than bioinformatics.SE, which explains this. Still, if we want to graduate we will need to bring more people and more questions to the site.

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I think we need more users, both questions and answers, after a hiatus I'm trying to be more active when I can, I think at this point it's worth us all trying to promote the site amongst colleagues as much as we can, and on social media too, perhaps someone could launch an official twitter account for the site, would that work?

I also see a lot of questions which are requests for support for specific programs, we should try reach out to the authors of such software and get them to address the questions directly on the site. I know Ensembl do a good effort in this respect, so it would be good to see other developers active here too. Again this is a matter of getting them involved when their software is discussed.

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    $\begingroup$ It the twitter account should be official it would have to come from SE. But I think a site gets one when it graduates. Good idea to try to bring here the developers of said tools, but sometimes they have their own venue too (I'm thinking in Bioconductor that has a forum for questions, and here we do get more questions too). $\endgroup$
    – llrs
    Jul 31, 2018 at 13:48
  • $\begingroup$ I personally find the Bioconductor forums and their imported email threads so annoying to read, I really wish they had chosen this platform and not the other one! $\endgroup$
    – Matt Bashton
    Jul 31, 2018 at 13:55

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