Ground Rules for Comments

I would like to keep the blog open as widely as possible to comments, and I am happy to have both dialogs with readers and broader, multi-party discussions. There has been some abuse of this policy, though, and so I am forced to lay down some ground rules.
  • If you are not registered on Blogger (and logged in), you will have to suffer through a Captcha verification. I usually cringe when I have to prove to Captcha that I'm a human (or reasonable facsimile), so I'm reluctant to do this. Unfortunately, the blog gets a nontrivial amount of comment spam even with the Captcha, and a surreal amount without it.
  • Please limit yourself to comments and questions pertinent to the topic of the post. I thought this was self-evident, but apparently I was wrong. Think about how you would feel if you went to a forum or blog on operations research and had to wade through a bunch of comments about what clothing people wore at the Oscars. Now think how someone else feels reading a post on Linux software and having to wade through a bunch of questions about integer programming.
  • CPLEX comes with rather good documentation, for which I've added a link in the right margin. It also comes with a number of sample programs (source code) in all the supported APIs. Before asking how to do XYZ in CPLEX, please avail yourself of these resources. I realize that some questions are hard to answer even after reading the documentation, and I do not mind tackling those (on a relevant post -- see the previous item). At the same time, it's not my mission in life to save other people the trouble of reading the documentation. Before asking a question, please be sure you know the meaning of the acronym RTFM.
  • This is a blog, not a help forum. Again, I am happy to answer questions about the content of a post, but if you need help on some software or (more likely) OR topic and it's not related to a particular post, you will have better luck (and I will be less cranky) if you go to a suitable forum. Please see the "Resources" box on the right for links to a few. I monitor some or all of those forums, so if you post the question there, it's quite likely I'll see it.
  • If you feel the need to include in your comment a lengthy excerpt of code from your program, you really need to read the previous bullet point again.
  • Finally, please have a look at "Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide".
Thank you for abiding by these rules ... and please do feel free to ask pertinent questions, post comments, and offer corrections (when I'm wrong, which is more often than I care to admit).

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Due to intermittent spamming, comments are being moderated. If this is your first time commenting on the blog, please read the Ground Rules for Comments. In particular, if you want to ask an operations research-related question not relevant to this post, consider asking it on Operations Research Stack Exchange.