[DISCUSSION] Common misconceptions and mistakes for anvi'o beginners that we should clarify in a blog post about anvio

[FlorianTrigodet]

Is that the search functions for posts is really bad (much worse than in Slack). From my experience, it seems like the search function only looks through the titles of posts, not the content of each thread.

There are (unfortunately) two search bars in Discord. There is the big one that is very inviting but only search terms in the post's title. And there is a second, smaller one in the top right corner that is a proper search bar and works nicely.

I can modify that screen shot and we could add it in the discord's rule-and-guidelines channel.

[meren]

And more likely than not, a lot of people just don't bother to read what was posted before, or to search the help pages at all. But I'm not sure how to discourage this behavior without refusing to answer people who haven't done their due diligence first, which feels wrong.

This highlights so well the dilemma inflicted upon people whose goal is to develop solutions that try to match the sophistication of the questions they aim to address.

While we don't want to alienate or push away those who don't have time or interest to read even the most clear error message that already explains them the problem and the solution, we are taking more and more time from our primary tasks to help them.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that we need a revolution rather than a yet another solution that will not go beyond what we have been already doing: trying to help those who will have time to read things (which often don't need our help).

So what would be the revolution in this context? Well, probably developing a language model that processes all our code, documentation, and Discord material periodically to give access to that nebula of wisdom through a chatbot. In an ideal world, the precious time of those who are genuinely thinking of the future of this community would be better spent on investigating available technologies to establish such a long-term solution than a blog post. But I know we do not live in an ideal world, and we are just trying to put out fires most of the time. Which is also admirable and needed, and this is what that blog post will do. So I am not saying let's stop doing this and do the other thing. But I just wanted to share my 2 cents in case it turns a light bulb in someone else's mind.

[meren]

This is a great point and a welcome attempt to ameliorate. I had hoped our help pages would address these issues, but I guess they are not enough by themselves as you point out.

Of course, we should also update the relevant anvi'o help pages associated with each issue (but it would still be useful to have these common issues described in one central location, IMO).

But I couldn't agree more with this statement above.

The funny thing is, we're using Discord so that the answers accumulate over time, so we don't have to respond to the same questions over and over again. But then, we realize we do that still, and now we are trying to put together an F.A.Q. by going through Discord :p Kind of funny and sad at the same time.

[ivagljiva]

Yeah, it is a little bit frustrating. I think one reason this doesn't work:

we're using Discord so that the answers accumulate over time, so we don't have to respond to the same questions over and over again.

Is that the search functions for posts is really bad (much worse than in Slack). From my experience, it seems like the search function only looks through the titles of posts, not the content of each thread. The titles of posts are generally very very poorly written, so of course people don't find anything. And sometimes people are posting questions within other threads that are only marginally related, so it gets lost that way.

And more likely than not, a lot of people just don't bother to read what was posted before, or to search the help pages at all. But I'm not sure how to discourage this behavior without refusing to answer people who haven't done their due diligence first, which feels wrong. Especially since it is not always clear if someone tried to look through previous posts or help pages, unless they explicitly say so).

Hopefully this effort will yield improvements to the most commonly-needed help pages so that we have multiple links to throw at people with these specific issues 😞

[Ge0rges]

Perhaps an online Anvi'o forum that would get indexed by Google would help with this on the long term? For example a hosted Discourse.

[Ge0rges]

I was thinking about this recently and thought of something other tools have done which is to defer people to forums such as StackOverflow (perhaps for Anvio this would be bioinformatics stack exchange) and create an Anvio tag there which a subset of us can monitor. This would get indexed and show up in search engine results. This also allows the wider community to participate in the A part of the Q&A more easily.

[meren]

The problem is we already moved everyone from Google Forums to Slack to Discord :( Now there is a lot of knowledge accumulated in Discord, if we move one more time it will mean yet another 'reset' to all that effort. In part that's why I think a modern and long-lasting solution here could be to train an LLM that processes all tutorials, code, and Discord threads.

[Ge0rges]

True, could be interesting to have a custom GPT.