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How to get help and support⚓︎

We work hard to make sure dcm2bids is robust and we welcome comments and questions to make sure it meets your use case!

While the dcm2bids volunteers and the neuroimaging community at large do their best to respond to help requests about dcm2bids, there are steps you can do to try to find answers and ways to optimize how to ask questions on the different channels. The path may be different according to your situation whether you want to ask a usage question or report a bug.

Where to look for answers⚓︎

Before looking for answers on any Web search engine, the best places to look for answers are:

1. This documentation⚓︎

You can use the built-in search function with key words or look throughout the documentation. If you end up finding your answer somewhere else, please inform us by opening an issue. If you faced an undocumented challenge while using dcm2bids, it is very likely others will face it as well. By gathering community knowledge, the documentation will improve drastically. Refer to the Request a new feature section below if you are unfamiliar with GitHub and issues.

2. Community support channels⚓︎

There are a couple of places you can look for

NeuroStars⚓︎

What is neurostars.org?

NeuroStars is a question and answer forum for neuroscience researchers, infrastructure providers and software developers, and free to access. It is managed by the [International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF)][incf] and it is widely used by the neuroimaging community.

NeuroStars is a gold mine of information about how others solved their problems or got answered to their questions regarding anything neuroscience, especially neuroimaging. NeuroStars is a good place to ask questions related to dcm2bids and the BIDS standards. Before asking your own questions, you may want to first browse through questions that were tagged with the dcm2bids tag.

To look for everything related to a specific tag, here's how you can do it for the dcm2bids tag:

The quick way

Type in your URL bar https://neurostars.org/tag/dcm2bids or click directly on it to bring the page will all post tagged with a dcm2bids tag. Then if you click on search, the dcm2bids will already be selected for you.

  1. Go to https://neurostars.org.
  2. Click on the search (🔍) icon.
  3. Either click on options to bring the advanced search and go to next step OR start typing dcm2bids.
  4. In the tag section on the right pane, select dcm2bids.

  5. Type your question in the search bar.

    • You might have to refine your question a couple of times to find the most relevant answers.
Steps in pictures

The next step before going on a search engine is to go where we develop dcm2bids, namely GitHub.

GitHub⚓︎

While we use GitHub to develop dcm2bids, some people have opened issues that could be relevant to your situation. You can browse through the open and closed issues: https://github.com/UNFmontreal/Dcm2Bids/issues?q=is%3Aissue and search for specific keywords or error messages.

If you find a specific issue and would like more details about it, you can simply write an additional comment in the Leave a comment section and press Comment.

Example in picture

Where to ask for questions, report a bug or request a feature⚓︎

After having read thoroughly all information you could find online about your question or issue, you may still some lingering questions or even more questions - that is okay! After all, maybe you would like to use dcm2bids for a specific use-case that has never been mentioned anywhere before. Below are described 3 ways to request help depending on your situation:

  1. Ask a question about dcm2bids
  2. Report a bug
  3. Request a new feature

We encourage you to post your question on NeuroStars with dcm2bids as an optional tag. The tag is really important because NeuroStars will notify the dcm2bids team only if the tag is present. You will get a quicker reply this way.

Report a bug⚓︎

If you think you've found a bug 🐛, and you could not find an issue already mentioning the problem, please open an issue on our repository. If you don't know how to open an issue, refer to the open an issue section below.

Request a new feature⚓︎

If you have more an inquiry or suggestion to make than a bug to report, we encourage you to start a conversation in the Discussions section. Similar to the bug reporting procedure, follow the open an issue below.

Open an issue⚓︎

To open or comment on an issue, you will need a GitHub account.

Issues are individual pieces of work (a bug to fix or a feature) that need to be completed to move the project forwards. We highly recommend you open an issue to explain what you want to do and how it echoes a specific demand from the community. Keep in mind the scope of the dcm2bids project.

A general guideline: if you find yourself tempted to write a great big issue that is difficult to describe as one unit of work, please consider splitting it into two or more. Moreover, it will be interesting to see how others approach your issue and give their opinion and advice to solve it.

If you have more an inquiry or suggestion to make than a bug to report, we encourage you to start a conversation in the Discussions section. Note that issues may be converted to a discussion if deemed relevant by the maintainers.

Last update: 2023-07-12
Created: 2022-04-18