We’re excited to announce community.rstudio.com , a new site for discussions about RStudio, the tidyverse, and friends. To begin with, we’re focussing on three main areas:

In the near future, we expect to launch a category for RStudio admins. This will be a place to coordinate knowledge about best practices for installing, configuring, and managing RStudio products, and for running R in production. Stay tuned for more details!

What is communty.rstudio.com for?#

It’s easiest to say what community.rstudio.com is not: it’s not a replacement for Stack Overflow, GitHub, or our premium support services:

  • If you have a precisely and clearly defined question (and accompanying reprex ), you should still ask it on Stack Overflow .

  • If you have discovered a bug in an R package, you should still file an issue on GitHub .

  • If you’re a customer with a commercial license for a Professional products, you should continue to report Pro product issues as described in our support agreement .

The goal of community.rstudio.com is to provide a friendly space for discussions that don’t quite fit into the above categories. It’s a great place to send your friends who are intimidated by Stack Overflow, or to go to if you’re not sure whether or not you’ve found a bug. We expect that it will gradually supplant our existing google groups like shiny-discuss and ggplot2.

RStudio employees will frequent the discussions, but we won’t have time to answer every question. We will ensure that discussions remain friendly and professional , but our goal is to foster an environment where the RStudio community can help one another.

Getting the ball rolling#

The RStudio forums are a community site, and a community site is nothing without a community! In order to generate some initial momentum, we’re going to be running four limited-time promotions:

  • Joe Cheng (developer of Shiny), Hadley Wickham (me), and Garrett Grolemund (RStudio master instructor) will do weekly office hours . We’ll each be online for at least one hour per week, and will spend that time answering your questions.

  • If you post in the first month, you’ll get a custom “founding member” badge for your community.rstudio.com profile.

  • Each week for the next month we’ll recognize a few of the most helpful participants, and send them a sticker pack and t-shirt. Post once during the week to be eligible.

  • Each month for the next six months we’ll select one person who we feel has been particularly helpful to the community, and send them a signed copy of R4DS and an RStudio t-shirt of their choice.

Depending on how things go, we might keep doing the prize packs for longer, but you should participate soon in order to maximise your chances of a sweet prize!