BioStar will attempt to merge accounts even when using different OpenID providers. If the system is not able to detect your existing account please see the account merge page.

Other sites may provide user login for Biostar. See the External Authentication page.

Special commands may be used to generate content in BioStar. These need to be added into the post body and will not be viewable in the preview. The transformations get applied only after submitting:

• \post 1 or a full url http://www.biostars.org/p/1/ will be replaced by a link to the post using the post title.
• \user 1 or a full url http://www.biostars.org/u/1/ will be replaced by a link using the user's display name.
• \gist 1 will embed the gists with id 1 into the post.
• \youtube AAA will embed youtube videos AAA into the main post. The YouTube ids can be seen in the URL bar like and have a form like bz93ReOv87Y.

We offer RSS feeds to many different sources of information. See the Feeds page

To build URL that returns posts that match multiple tags separate these with + (plus) sign. For example: /show/tag/galaxy+bwa+tutorial/. Similarly to exclude a tag add the exclamation suffix to it like this blast!. You can combine them like so /show/tag/tutorial+sequence+blast!/

Sign up at Gravatar and also set your email in BioStar to match the email that is registered at Gravatar.

This site's focus is bioinformatics, computational genomics and biological data analysis. Only posts on these topics or those pertaining to Biostar itself are allowed. The Questions section requires that a post be formulated as a question. All other type of post, annoucements or discussions should go under the Forum category. Moderators will reclassify posts that do not belong to the correct category.

Posts may be removed or may be set deleted (invisible) status. Only the author of a post may remove it withouth a trace. Moreover this action is only available as long as the post does not have other posts attached to it as answers or comments. In all other cases the post can only be deleted (set to be invisible), and the delete action is reversible. Please contact the site managers/administrators if you feel strongly that certain content needs to be removed.

Users posting content that does not belong to the site will be notified and required to edit their content. Users may post commercially motivated posts to the Forum section as long as the topic aligns with the main focus of this site. Users posting obvious spam will be immediately suspended.

Moderators may reclassify incorrectly formulated posts with the FixMe category. These post will not show up in the questions section. The authors of these posts will periodically receive a notification that they have posts that need further editing. Once edited the post type needs to be changed back to the original type.

Each user has access to up to 10 votes every six hours. Users asking questions are encouraged to click accept () to indicate contributions that fully answer the question. Note that multiple answers may be accepted on a question, thus the author of a question can reward excellent answers with both an upvote and an accept. There is no reputation penalty for downvotes.

The number next to a user's name is the sum of upvotes and accepted answers that user has collected. Hails to three highest ranked users:

On most pages posts are ordered by their rank. This rank is a combination of the creation date (more recent dates have higher rank) and the number of votes and pageviews that the post has accumulated.

See Ten Simple Rules for Getting Help from Online Scientific Communities

Post in the Biostar Central newsgroup or in the Forum section of the site.

You can bookmark any post by clicking on the bookmark symbol (). This will add the post to your bookmark tab that is accesible from your account. Your activity tab on your profile page will show the responses that took place on the posts that you have interacted with. New activity will generate the new message icon () in the navigation bar. Note that you can also subscribe to these messages as an RSS feed

To view the moderator actions see the moderator log list

The list of tracked blogs can be viewed on the blog list. Contact us if you wish to be included.

Active users above a certain reputation treshold are periodically promoted to moderators. You may also explicitly ask for moderation rights or suggest good candidates on the newsgroup. Inactive users that do not visit the site for extended periods of time may lose their moderation rights.

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