STATA or other chat / IRC / live realtime help resource? Codementor?

[Will Hall]

Hi all, I am a newcomer to STATA and diving in to the manuals tutorials helpfiles. and now recently signed up for this forum.

Is there a live realtime place I can go for help on STATA use? Like an IRC channel or chat site or something?

I have used the Codementor site a few times with some basic questions to available live freelancers when I have gotten stuck, it's been very helpful but I was wondering if there are other resources - beyond this forum (which has been very useful btw, I just like to have a live person to ask when I get stuck and can't find the solution in searching around and when I can't wait for forums replies).

Thanks!

[Nick Cox]

You've found the best resource, in my prejudiced opinion. My bias is that serious Stata support requires something like a web forum. Chat would slow things down unless the queries allow very short answers.

Statalist allows private messages, but you need willing partners. The most active people here tend to encourage you to ask a question publicly rather than ask in a private message. This is explained at https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#adviceextras

I don't post on it but I glance at Twitter occasionally. My impression is that attempts to elicit Stata support there often don't work well, but naturally I can't see what isn't public.

Reddit is perhaps the closest in style to what you're asking for. Again, I glance at it occasionally. It's perhaps more supportive of the style of interaction you ask for than is Statalist but the number of experienced users and programmers who are active there is much smaller than on Statalist (I think that's factual) and the average helpfulness of answers is lower (that's a personal judgement). That's not a reflection on the frequent users so much as a comment on some of the questions. But also quite easy questions are more likely to be ignored there. Cryptic identifiers are the norm, so if that's important to you, it is a plus.

It's Stata, by the way. https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#spelling

[Will Hall]

Thank you so much!