---
title: Thanks, Jean-Olivier Irisson, for Mentioning Cross-posting!
date: '2017-10-09'
slug: cross-posting
---

Many people cross-post the same questions in different places: private emails, Stack Overflow, Disqus threads, Twitter, and mailing lists, etc. It is totally fine to cross-post questions. You may be eager to obtain an answer, which is understandable.

What is bad, however, is that you do not mention that you cross-posted the question in other places. This has happened several times in the past to me: after I try hard to reply an email from someone asking me a question, I start to go through the Stack Overflow question feeds I subscribed, and find the same question has been posted there, and answered by someone else.

This is very discouraging.

Of course, I hope someone else can solve your problem before me, so I can spend the time on other things, such as reading books, or making a chiffon cake or moon cakes. 

Today I started to triage **rmarkdown** issues again, and came across the issue [rstudio/rmarkdown#1129](https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/1129). That is the type of issues I like: the author Jean-Olivier Irisson (@jiho) clearly mentioned that he had cross-posted it in another repo. When I read this issue, I'll first check if the issue has been solved in the other repo. If it happens to have been solved, I won't need to invest time in it. Well unfortunately, it is still an open issue, which means I'll have to work on it someday, but I appreciate Jean-Olivier's mention of cross-posting.

Actually there is some subtle psychology here. If you are a total stranger asking me a question, I don't feel I owe you anything (unless it is a bug of my software). However, if you show your consideration to me (even a little bit), you will make me feel indebted, and I'll increase the priority of your issue or question. Sometimes I [answer questions](/en/2017/09/thanks-max/) simply [out of appreciation](/en/2017/08/so-gh-email/).

In case you want to read more on this topic:

- [Gimme Pizza!](http://latex.org/know-how/latex-community/94-etiquette/454-crossposts) (a post in a LaTeX community; pointed out by Scott Kostyshak)

## Appendix

Here is a list of good examples of mentioning cross-posting:

- [gcushen/hugo-academic#416](https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic/issues/416) by @lucasmation
- [rstudio/rmarkdown#1498](https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/1498) by @joelkuiper
