So this idea is kind of out there--and may be beyond the scope of what this summer project could do. But I'm going to say it anyway. Feel free to ignore it, mull on it for something later, or simply laugh.
I was looking over at the new Galaxy Biostar, which is very cool. I am delighted to reduce the number of support mailing lists I am on, and that is an excellent way to manage the same kind of information instead.
What I think would be great would be to offer a sort of insta-portal for support for your tool within the Biostar framework. So what I mean is that some of the small software teams that deliver very cool tools have less support resources than would be ideal. Sometimes these include mailing lists, sometimes not. Sometimes I just email or contact-form submit stuff into what appears to be a black hole. Sometimes I get answers. Sometimes not.
But what if you could offer any tool provider a [MyTool]-Biostar kind of channel. They get a little intro place, a little branding, post notices of updates, people can ask questions, answers remain in the public sphere. If they don't have a lot of support resources, this could help them out. Even if they do, it might be a nice supplemental place to support users.
It might be a thing they could put in their grant proposals, something like: We will create a MyTool Biostar channel to support users, and then toss a little money to Biostar for maintenance perhaps.
This is something that would help me as an end user of many tools very much.
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Istvan Albert
Good point with the API! I thought that
main/server/api.pywas already migrated into biostars2. There's a very good starting point, after that, programming additional external features/plugins should be more attainable.