[Biomod-commits] Biomod-commits Digest, Vol 34, Issue 31

[Andreas Soteriades]

Dear Wilfried,
 

>If you are not able to understand humor from people who tried to help you for free on their spare time, better to keep going outside of the R environment. 

What you said was funny indeed, but how does it help me with my research? It is ok to make humour but you should always remember that the mailing list is public and that other people may also have the same question for which they didn't get a serious answer. How did your joke answer my question? Or should I continue emailing my question again and again until I get a serious reply, while annoying the rest of the users?

It makes perfect sense to help people for free because BIOMOD is developed by you and it constitutes a significant part of your long term ongoing projects, not to mention that whoever uses it for their research cite at least one of your papers... I really do not get your point; what more would a researcher ask for than recognition for their research? I must admit that I am strugling to understand your way of thinking.

Concerning your comment that I should go outside the R environment: R has worked pretty well for me so far- BIOMOD hasn't though...

As I mentioned in my previous email, I truly believe in BIOMOD's innovative features and would love to be able to use it in my research. I also mentioned that I prefer it from other software. Judging from your comments, you found this point funny as well!

>I want to remind you that besides the manuals, which are so badly written, you have the help files in R... 

... whose text in many cases has been copied and pasted into the manuals...

>I agree there are probably not the best self-explanatory you can find, but still if you follow them, you should >be able to find your way, as many people have done before you.  


Yes, many people have done so before me, succeeding to do their job I guess. But you should not forget that many researchers, including numerous biologists, are not very familiar with programming so a bad manual directly turns their choice to another software, e.g. MaxEnt.

>Having say that, I downloaded the Maxent data and now that I had the exact code you used, I simply copy->pasted your code and run BIOMOD. I am sorry to say, it worked pretty well, and the Models folder was full >of the models outputs, as the Pred folder was. 

I also re-ran the models and they worked fine. But the analysis stops there because of the... manual!

To conclude, I will keep using BIOMOD; I can't turn my back to such a powerful tool just because you are too stubborn to realise that you could had made it much more accesible to non-specialists.

And by the way, I'll continue using the mailing list to post my enquires :-)

Cheers,
Andreas
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