Agreed! :) I just haven't ever done that... ;) I'm happy if someone else does it but would otherwise look into it next week or so...

I wanted to do it, but I couldn’t create gitter.im/scanpy.

I noticed that https://github.com/scanpy exists which seems to be the problem. Seems to be a typo though, their name is Scana.py with a second “a”. I contacted the GitHub support, maybe they can rename it and give us https://github.com/scanpy.

Thanks, great!

As a possible alternate/ supplement, what about a discourse forum? I think threaded conversations are useful, especially when you can't expect everyone who has input to be online at the same time. It also looks like google indexes discourse, which could reduce repeated questions.

I created gitter.im/scanpyhelp

https://gitter.im/scanpyhelp/community?utm_source=share-link&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=share-link

@ivirshup A discourse forum would be great but it looks like its quite pricy with no free version

Expanding on this a bit, here's an example discourse forum I've found useful: https://discourse.julialang.org. Good, relevant threads show up all the time in google searches, while I've spent a lot of time trying to find help on various pyviz and conda gitters with a pretty low success rate.

I think something like gitter/ single slack channel works for about 20 people, but after that it gets a bit rough. Having a single stream of messages means keeping track of a conversation over days becomes a huge task. Topics get dropped not based on the value of the discussion, but because of the conversation's overhead.

@outlace, whoops, didn't see your message before I posted mine, chatroom model woulda stopped that.

It looks to me like it's free to self host and theres (admittedly kinda high) educational price for discourse. I'll check out how easy it is to self host.

An alternative for threaded conversations is a good old fashioned google group or a tag on stack overflow. (edit: we could probably even just use biostars)

The main reason I'm pushing this, is because the more I think about it, the more how unhelpful most gitters have been for me. It might to do with being in a non-European or American timezone though.

@ivirshup I guess stackoverflow tag would work for now until a dedicated discourse or the like is setup. The advantage of gitter is that if people are online questions can be answered rapidly which is helpful when youre in the middle of an analysis and run into a problem. It's no fun when you have to give up and wait until the next day to get some help. But I can see that timezone differences may prevent this if the users and collaborators are not timezone similar.

Hi, we’re still waiting for a response from the owners of https://github.com/scanpy (we asked them if it’s possible to rename the org to “scanapy”, the actual name of their project)

Until then, I’d like to not use gitter.im/scanpyhelp

@flying-sheep Still no response?

not yet, but we sent the message to them only recently.

It's been about 3 months and there's still no place for people to ask questions except to file issues. https://gitter.im/scanpyhelp/community is still there

Yes, we sadly didn’t get any response from the people owning https://github.com/scanpy

@ALL: Should we go ahead and advertise https://gitter.im/scanpyhelp?

I don't know how I missed this the first time, but discourse could just be free for us https://free.discourse.group. I can go ahead and set this up, but would also be fine with a google group.

I have to admit that I'm still not an expert in these forums. I'm happy if we go with https://gitter.im/scanpyhelp as a solution. I also know discourse is super popular among many people and I'm happy if we go with it if all three of you, @outlace, @ivirshup and @flying-sheep, think this could be a better place. I simply can't judge myself as I haven't used either of them.

Most importantly, let's put what you guys choose on the top of the webpage and properly announce it; it would be terrible to have several of these chat rooms; one on gitter, one discourse, etc. with potentially even different names scanpyhelp, scanpy etc.

Yeah now I think discourse or a google group would be best. That way questions that are asked are preserved and searchable.

Great! @ivirshup set up this https://scanpy.discourse.group. We'll properly announce it and, I hope this becomes the persistent place for discussing issues around using Scanpy.

Thank you for the initiative, Brandon! I'll close this for now; if we're unhappy with this solution, we can get back at some point.

I'll also follow up on this with an email to you guys.

PS: Brandon, could you delete scanpyhelp at gitter so that we avoid potentially confusing people? Thank you.
PPS: For reference: df80290