Forum:How to support bioinformatics tools via Biostars: prefill and watch tags, reply via email

Question

[Istvan Albert]

We have just added a number of features intended to facilitate supporting bioinformatics tools via Biostars. These are as follows:

1. Watched tags: each user profile now includes the option of listing tags that will trigger email notifications. The user will receive an email when a new post matching any of their watched tags is posted. Users may unsubscribe from these posts at any time.
2. Pre-fill new post tags: to ensure that posts get assigned the desired tags tool developers may redirect questions to a specially formatted URL that contains the desired tags. For example: https://www.biostars.org/p/new/post/?tag_val=minia,assembly Doing so will ensure that users will not forget to set the tags.
3. Respond via email: any email that a user receives from Biostars can now be replied to directly from the email client. The software will ensure that the email is posted in the correct thread. The emails will be treated as markdown documents. A subset of HTML and markdown constructs are allowed. Email replies to questions will post as answers, email replies to answers or other comments will post as comments.

The features above should ensure a more streamlined and simpler tool support.

Other improvements: There is a Twitter ID field for the user profile. It works similarly to the Google Scholar field.

Note: These above are quite substantial new features and as such may have bugs, please report them either here or in the issue tracker.

Answer 1

[Andreas]

Hey Istvan,

I have a related question: the pindel folks have a nice logo, which says 'Supported on BioStar'. I suppose that's not official, but wouldn't it be nice to have such a thing?

Andreas

[Daniel]

FYI, that 404s but I like the concept.

[Andreas]

New link http://gmt.genome.wustl.edu/packages/pindel/

[Istvan Albert]

You mean a little html snippet one could insert into their webpage. Good idea indeed.

https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central/issues/237

Answer 2

[Emily]

Hello. MyTags is no longer working for me. I still have them listed in my profile, but the page in BioStar us now completely empty. Not sure if this is related to these changes. Thanks.

[Istvan Albert]

oh yes I missed to apply one correction to all existing my tags, these now need to be comma separated the same way as the watched tags,

I will add this correction, in the meantime can you check if this fixes your problem

[Emily]

Fixed it. Brilliant. Thank you.

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

Is there a difference if tags are comma-space separated (e.g. "vcf, networks, cancer") or just comma-separated (e.g. "vcf,networks,cancer")?

[alesssia]

Hello! Both MyTags and Watched Tags are no longer working. They are correctly listed in my profile, but I do not receive any email. I don't receive email neither when someone answers/comments on questions I have posted. I have set "notification" to both "email" and "mailing list mode" with no success.