All Questions
126
questions
26
votes
4
answers
881
views
Is there a large enough community to sustain this site?
Update:
This site has passed the final evaluation! Barring any technical delays, Bioinformatics SE should go public sometime this week.
Great work everyone!
(original post)
Spread the word. In less ...
- 100
22
votes
8
answers
664
views
Accepting Nominations — Who should moderate this site? [duplicate]
Ideally, Moderators♦ are elected by the community, but until the community is large enough to hold a proper election, we will be appointing three provisional Moderators to fill those roles.
We need ...
- 100
21
votes
3
answers
231
views
What sort of questions are appropriate for Bioinformatics SE?
I have spent a lot of time on StackOverflow and am pretty familiar with the types of questions that are and are not allowed on the site. I am a little unsure as to how well the strict question rules ...
- 429
20
votes
2
answers
153
views
Can we have math layouting?
Several other communities (in particular Stats and Biology, which are closely related to Biofx.SE) have MathJax support.
This would be highly desirable here as well, since pseudocode and equations ...
- 4,845
20
votes
1
answer
133
views
Can we have syntax highlighting?
It seems that language syntax highlighting is not working.
As I think we will have many answers involving small code fragments. Is it possible to enable this?
Few examples: 1, 2.
I used ...
- 2,725
19
votes
2
answers
195
views
Community promotion ads
Shall we start a small advertising campaign?
Some Stack Exchange communities vote on “community ads” — banners that link to other resources related to the topic. Highly voted proposals get free ad ...
- 4,845
18
votes
0
answers
107
views
Let’s standardise some tags
Let’s standardise some tags.
For instance, there are already two competing conventions at work:
rna-seq
scrnaseq
Either both should use a dash, or none should.
I propose the slightly more readable ...
- 4,845
15
votes
3
answers
249
views
Please refrain from closing proper but imperfect questions so quickly
I have been thinking about this for a while. This recently on-hold question really touches my nerve. The question is put on hold due to being too "broad". I will use it as an example to explain my ...
- 6,485
15
votes
1
answer
234
views
What to do with answers inspired by BioStars?
Out of curiosity I followed the first of Pierre's BioStars links from the comments on the FASTA lengths question, and noticed that our currently accepted answer bears a strong resemblance to this ...
- 772
14
votes
3
answers
157
views
How do we feel about questions that are essentially about text parsing?
A lot of the daily tasks of a bioinformatician can be boiled down to simple text parsing. Yes, we will be dealing with text files containing some form of biological data, but the answer might not ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
14
votes
2
answers
193
views
Should we allow questions about biology?
How do we feel about questions about biological principles that can be confusing to a bioinformatician with no background in biology? While purely biological questions should, I think, be off topic ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
14
votes
0
answers
178
views
Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
- 101
11
votes
2
answers
168
views
Computational biology but not gene sequences?
I see that this site is focused on sequencing and genomics. I'm wondering if other fields that combine computations and biology are on-topic. Such as:
molecular dynamics simulations,
analyzing 3d ...
- 1,261
10
votes
3
answers
133
views
Improving the site after 1 Year!
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 ...
- 4,693
10
votes
1
answer
98
views
Is it okay to write a post Introducing a tool?
I have just developed a new bioinformatic tool and I was simply wondering whether it is okay to write a post introducing the tool?
10
votes
1
answer
96
views
Are we supposed to delete comments, once the issue has been resolved?
Sometimes a comment, leads to the answer (or question) update. In such case the comment is not relevant anymore, since it addresses a resolved issue.
Are we supposed to delete comments like this? E.g. ...
- 2,725
10
votes
3
answers
139
views
Serving as a "support forum" for specific tools
One of the nice features of biostars is that the site is open to people using it as a forum for supporting their own tools (i.e., as a replacement for a tool-specific email list). The tool authors ...
- 19.6k
10
votes
2
answers
76
views
Q&A-Style Answering Own Question
Since the site is in beta, and the idea is to develop a core of high-quality questions: should we be posting what we think are good questions which we ourselves know the answers to?
For example, I ...
- 2,133
10
votes
2
answers
164
views
Moderators: Please do not close questions just because they are old
I just had an old question of mine closed by a moderator with the following comment:
I’m voting to close this question because it was asked a long time ago, and it is likely that an answer is no ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
9
votes
4
answers
308
views
Should we relax the requirement for disclosing affiliation on the site?
There is a general rule on the Stack Exchange network that states that if you post an answer suggesting something you are involved with (e.g. a tool you wrote or a blog post you authored or whatever), ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
9
votes
1
answer
118
views
Testing the boundaries of good questions?
In general, if you are unsure whether a question is the sort of thing we are going to want to see here, is it better to ask it on the main site and see if it gets closed, or enquire on meta first if ...
- 3,301
9
votes
1
answer
87
views
General guidelines on creating tag synonyms and naming (personal opinions)
Recently, there have been a few threads on creating tag synonyms. I think most of these are not really synonyms. The following shows my thoughts about what are synonyms and what are not. I will also ...
- 6,485
8
votes
3
answers
85
views
What do we do with [software-recommendation]?
software-recommendation seems like a highly questionable tag to me, yet it’s collecting questions.
On other Stack Exchange sites, most notably Stack Overflow, software recommendations are explicitly ...
- 4,845
8
votes
3
answers
139
views
Migrating bioinformatics questions from other SE sites
There are a host of Bioinformatics questions on StackOverflow, CrossValidated, and probably other SE sites as well.
Many of these questions would now be better placed here than on the site they were ...
- 2,133
8
votes
1
answer
58
views
Message from a shy user
How can I make sure I'm not distracting researchers from their work, with a bunch of questions.
I feel I could ask a lot, primarily because I have studied very little.
I don't think I could ask a lot, ...
8
votes
1
answer
84
views
2022 Community Moderator Election Results
Bioinformatics's second moderator election has come to a close. Since there were not enough candidates for a competitive election, we simply appointed the candidates who nominated themselves as pro-...
- 101
7
votes
2
answers
445
views
Please stop cross posting behavior
Please stop cross posting behavior from biostars.org, where new questions are immediately transferred to this site. If you think you need this to boost your question count over the required threshold, ...
- 173
7
votes
3
answers
190
views
Interacting with other Q&A communities
When the proposal of Bioinformatics started there was a discussion in Biostars about the this site (and SE in general compared to Biostars). Some of the points raised are:
Unfriendly community, ...
- 4,693
7
votes
1
answer
134
views
Is it okay to ask questions regarding being a bioinformatician?
I was wondering if the Bioinformatics SE is a good place to post questions relating to the process of research in bioinformatics.
Example:
What is the proper way to format a PK/PD model for a ...
7
votes
1
answer
128
views
Where is the review button?
When I signed up for the site and look up in the part were the review button was suppose to be it wasn't there as indicated by this screen shot here.
This seems kind of weird considering the fact ...
7
votes
1
answer
77
views
How much this site is/ going to be on-topic to bio student lacking a proper IT and stat base?
I felt like if anyone have to learn bioinformatics in the 'proper' way, conceptually; then a base of statistics, data-modelling and computer-programing is a prerequisite. But biology students of most ...
- 183
7
votes
1
answer
37
views
Are questions looking for help to find data on topic?
There are some questions1, 2 about finding data suitable for an experiment or validate a method.
Are those question on topic?
I was going to post a new one but then I thought that it might be too ...
- 4,693
7
votes
1
answer
99
views
Are stories useful for bioinformatics questions?
I've just had a look at the fastest FASTA/FASTQ question, and felt that it was a bit lacking in substance. It was an answerable, specific question, and all the answers seem to concentrate on a single ...
gringerMod
- 13.8k
7
votes
1
answer
54
views
Can we add a [bedops] tag?
I was wondering how tags are added. I'm a new user to this SE site, so I don't have the reputation to add new tags. Can we please add a bedops tag to make it easier ...
- 3,125
7
votes
0
answers
33
views
PSA: Please don't post images of text
When asking or answering questions, please don't post screenshots of text. This is a very bad idea because:
You can't copy/paste the commands into answers, google searches, local files to work on a ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
7
votes
0
answers
59
views
2021 Community Moderator Election Results
Bioinformatics Stack Exchange's first moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the two new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank ...
- 101
7
votes
0
answers
61
views
2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in ...
- 101
6
votes
4
answers
125
views
Should pure statistics questions be on topic?
This question was prompted by differential gene expression complex design no replicates.
While that question isn't very clear, it seems to be essentially asking for help on applying statistical ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
6
votes
2
answers
226
views
2022 Potential Moderator Election: Community Interest Check
UPDATE: The election has now been scheduled. Thanks for all who expressed interest in nominating.
The last bioinfo mod elections happened 465 days ago and with the recent power vacuum created by my ...
- 5,517
6
votes
2
answers
125
views
Closing because a question is cross posted?
A question has been closed as off-topic, and the moderator who closed said in a comment:
This is already receiving sufficient attention on biostars. Giving it further attention here would be a waste ...
- 4,693
6
votes
1
answer
53
views
Make tags [mapping] and [read mapping] synonyms
The topic of read mapping is a sufficiently distinct subset of the more general class of sequence alignment topics to warrant a dedicated tag. However, we should collapse ...
- 5,060
6
votes
3
answers
88
views
Deleting comments before the question is answered
I received an email stating I have unread items in SE inbox. When I clicked on the link, the comments had already been deleted. I remember having a discussion with the OP in the comment section not ...
- 2,086
6
votes
1
answer
135
views
I'm a bioinfo software developer, and I would like to use bioinformatics SE as the main platform for Q&A
I'm an author of bioinformatic software and I would like to use this stackexchange as the main platform for questions and answers (indicate this in the README). The software is recent and there is no ...
- 2,725
6
votes
1
answer
124
views
I am resigning as a moderator
it's been an honour to help the bioinfo.SE to be a clean, constructive and kind space for sharing our expertise in bioinformatics. However, I recently quit my job and taking some time off and I don't ...
- 5,517
6
votes
0
answers
88
views
2022 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection
The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.
Bioinformatics Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next ...
- 101
6
votes
0
answers
64
views
Standard language for comments asking for an improved question?
One of the first things I needed to learn when coming to SO for the first time was how to ask a good question. I suspect I'm not alone in this. I was fortunate to have responses to my first (poorly ...
- 298
5
votes
2
answers
91
views
Should we be asking OPs to accept answers?
I have been seeing a lot of questions on here with answers, but most don't seem to have accepted answers (the check mark thing next to the answer comment). Based on my (limited) experience with SO, ...
- 131
5
votes
5
answers
118
views
Make tags [sam] and [bam] synonyms
SAM and BAM are effectively plain-text and binary representations of the same alignment format. I'd argue these terms should be synonyms.
UPDATE: It doesn't look like we've reached a consensus, but I ...
- 5,060
5
votes
2
answers
92
views
Are questions about installing bioinformatics tools on topic?
Should we allow questions asking for help installing specific tools? Some of the tools that are commonly used in bionformatics are non-trivial to install. They can require other packages, environment ...
terdonMod
- 9,662
5
votes
3
answers
100
views
Questions about commercial products where there are official support channels
Though inspired by this question, this tends to come up more often in relation to CLC Workbench. On occasion, people using commercial closed-source packages will post questions about using said tools ...
- 19.6k