st: Bill Gould, the blogger

[Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com>]

Dear statalisters,

I would like to bring up an excellent write up of how to effectively
frame your statalist communication:

http://blog.stata.com/2010/12/14/how-to-successfully-ask-a-question-on-statalist/

My two cents that I would like to add to it is that when you ask a
question about a user-written routine, you need to tell specifically
what the version is (-which blah-) and how you obtained it. If it is
not available on SSC and cannot be located with -findit-, and you got
it over the intranet in your organization's MARS (messy archive of
random software), chances are nobody will be able to answer the
question except the author of the code. Sometimes, updates with bug
fixes or improved functionality are available, but since those are
user-written programs, they won't get themselves updated
automatically, unlike the official Stata -update-.

-- 
Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name
Small print: I use this email account for mailing lists only.
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