How should we handle self-answered / today I learned / publications posts?

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#1

Occasionally we see threads of tools, tricks, and ideas the poster recently learned about and wanted to share. Often these posts are "Here's something useful I learned, what do you think?" Many include links to a blog the poster created detailing what they've learned.

There has been some push to better designate these posts.

  1. Partly, so they are easily distinguished from posts from people seeking help.
  2. And partly to better promote the best lessons learned.

I am leaning towards the following;

Creating a guide for posting self-answered questions and own-blog-publications. This would be pretty simple, but the guide would be incorporated into a helper-form so we help people stay consistent. This would include a special tag for these types of threads (hopefully solving issue 1).

A similar wizard-form for coding-questions.

These wizards (particularly the guide + form for new-user coding questions) would appear prominently on the homepage.

I am curious for your thoughts and advice on what a guide on this might look like?

Thank you @andresrcs for suggesting this idea!

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#2

About the structure of this kind of publications, I would suggest including a tag in the topic title (GitHub style e.g. Feature Request:) and separating the problem description and context from the actual solution (that would alow to mark it as solved)

Self-Answered: Here is how to do this interesting thing in R

<!-- 
    Description/context of the problem you are solving
-->
    
<!-- 
    Cool solution or link to a blog post, preferably on a subsequent post
-->
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#3

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#4
#5

I ran across this today when I discovered that Long & Teetor's R Cookbook, 2nd Ed. was now available online at no charge.

I tagged it General | online-resources , and @andresrcs filled in self answered . I agree with him that a helper-form would be useful, especially for users searching for this type of information.

#6

I was just about to do something like this, but I'm not sure I understand your suggestion about separating the problem from the solution. I was thinking of replying to my own post, but from your note, it sounds like this might be not be necessary -- is this right?

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#7

That is exactly what I'm talking about, to put the solution to the problem on a reply so the topic can be marked as solved but I understand that this might not be always possible.

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