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Where are other places for R discussions?

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Where else is there to go for R discussion?

I can think of:

The R-help mailing lists - specialised into general R-help and the specialised dev lists, and also into special interest lists like R-spatial

There's posit's R community forum.

There's also plenty of discussion on social media.

Any other forums and discords etc?

Obviously there's "here" but I don't think this experiment is going well...

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Obviously there's "here" but I don't think this experiment is going well...

I do not object to discussing the alternatives, yet I want to pick out just this one in my contribution.

A few things to consider - as I believe there are plenty of users here interested in R - not only those who want to learn, but also enough that can contribute in more advanced discussion topics.

  • I suggest the addition of guidelines for Discussions similar as on how to write a Question
  • I suggest the option to close, the wrongly posted Questions should be closed as soon as possible.
  • IMO, discussions should not be an alternative way to ask recommendations under the safety of a discussion. Sure different approaches can be discussed to highlight the pro's and con's. So recommendation questions I rather see closed, while opinion based questions can be a great discussion, including comparison of tools/libraries and methods.
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I think you need to take this to the meta discussion about discussions...
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We do have some guidelines for Discussions in our Help Center. What do you think of these? Do you have ideas about how they could be more useful, or more accessible to users? https://stackoverflow.com/help/discussions-guidelines
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@Sasha Ah thanks I did miss that, I usually enter SO from the R language collective, where in the overview there are a few sticky ones, including the "How to" for Questions, perhaps it could be pinned there too for Discussions. As we see quite a few Discussions started from new members just wanting to start a Question, perhaps they both could be sticky entering the Question and Discussion tab respectively. I like the guidelines though.
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@Spacedman there's flexibility in how things are managed per-collective too, some things may make more sense for one than another.

"wrongly posted Questions should be closed as soon as possible." -- should this be the practice for R Discussions? It can be, but doesn't have to be in (for example) NLP.

@Merijn, regarding "recommendations" -- do you suggest that it is possible for all asks for recommendations to be forced into the format dictated by Q&A rules? Do you think that some are more well-suited for Discussions? That is one of the uses we imagine for the Discussions space.
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@Berthold, perhaps closing is indeed not needed, probably an admin feature to Move a Question asked in a Discussion post to the Question section would even be better. In practice we see (perhaps because it is new still) quite a few new members that posted a question just in the wrong section. It results in many downvotes while they probably did not even realize the "mistake". So now thinking of that a Close ánd a Move to Questions would be an addition I think

I personally do not like forced formats, but stimulating or encourage members to get most out of their discussions seems needed. I was not aware of the curremt guidelines when I first replied. I think they are pretty decent, the only thing is that it might be handy to make it sticky on top of the Discussion tab when entering a Collective.
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@Sasha, we also have How to Ask but what percentage of users actually read those. Even the [tour] is not getting enough attention regardless of the fact that there is a badge for taking it and it is advertised through tooltips. While the Discussions guidelines are a WIP, I think it looks OK for what this feature aspires to be. But the impact on the experiment and the quality of network remains virtually non-existent, same as the impact of other parts of the help center.
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There is a Discord server dedicated to R, nicely called discoRd

https://discord.com/invite/FQp6ZNd
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There is a very active R group on Slack: "R4DS Online Learning".
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That'll be linked via the https://rfordatasci.com/ URL for more information.
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I like the #rstats community on https://fosstodon.org/ and the R contributors Slack (for those interested in contributing to base R) https://contributor.r-project.org/slack
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For UK Health service use of R there is NHS-R https://nhsrcommunity.com/ They have a great slack as well as a twitter presence.
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There is R-bloggers a collection of blogs with R focus:
https://www.r-bloggers.com/

I look there regularly for updates.
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Twitter, especially the #RStats hashtag used to be good to engage in light weight discussion (sometimes even more), but I feel like that's not the case any more.