Hi everyone! 
The preCICE forum is quite active lately, and more users are helping other users. With this post, we would like to show you a few features that may help you use the forum more effectively.
Tags and categories
When you start a new topic, you can select a category, as well as several tags. For example, if you are writing your own adapter (i.e., directly using the preCICE API) for an FSI application and want to know how to use the direct mesh access feature, you can select the category “Using preCICE” and use the tags direct-mesh-access and fsi. If you, instead, are setting up a new CHT simulation with OpenFOAM and FEniCS, you can use the category “Official adapters and tutorials” and use the tags cht, openfoam, and fenics.
Both tags and categories allow subscribing to receive notifications about a specific topic. Click on a tag or category, and you can find the notification settings on the top right:
Apart from notifications, this also allows us to have a rough overview of how many people are discussing a particular feature of preCICE.
What other tags would you like to see?
New: User groups
There are these posts that we really want to answer, but we don’t know how. So, we need some help, and we don’t know who to call.
If there’s somethin’ strange
In your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call?
Ghostbusters!
Be our volunteer Ghostbusters! Join one of the new groups of CalculiX, code_aster, and SU2 users. The next time we have a CalculiX question we cannot answer, we can call the @calculix-users instead of tagging specific people that we think may be able to help.
While we are starting to test user groups with these three groups, we may add more in the future.
Which other groups would you like to be a part of?
Growing a white beard
(or other signs of seniority)
Our forum is based on the Discourse platform. Users of Discourse automatically get more permissions, the more they engage. As you go up the “trust level” ladder, you will notice that you get more and more moderation rights, which is super helpful as the community grows.
We have recently done some batch-processing of all untagged, uncategorized, and some mis-categorized topics, trying to keep everything easy to find, and created many new tags. This benefits all of the community in the long term.
Help us help you
When you ask support questions, remember a few things you can do to make it easier for us to understand your problem:
- Add the complete error message as a code snippet. You can do that by focusing the text and selecting
preformatted text. - Read any instructions in the error messages you get, and upload the complete (or a minimal relevant part of) the output of each participant.
- Upload your
precice-config.xmland, ideally, a visualization of your preCICE configuration. - Help the future reader by marking which post finally solved your question, and keep one main question per thread.
Some things you could try to avoid:
- No need to upload the complete case files on some external cloud storage. Better have a few relevant files directly on the forum, for the future reader.
- Screenshots are nice, but they don’t appear in text searches, and we cannot copy the error messages to look for them in the code.
Read more about the preCICE forum and some of the nice features: One year of preCICE on Discourse
Enjoy! 