Spost13 Status Update

[Richard Williams]

Scott Long asked me to post this:

UPDATE on SPOST13: About four weeks ago Indiana University abruptly shut down all sites hosted by IU due to serious security vulnerabilities. Restoring the IU web has taken much longer than anticipated and many, perhaps most, departmental and faculty sites have not been restored. Jeremy Freese is working on hosting the spost13_ado and spost13_do packages at Stanford. Jeremy and I apologize for the problems. Thanks to Rich for posting this message. Scott Long


When Scott and Jeremy get a new site working I will post it here. Rich

[Chen Samulsion]

Thank you so much professor Richard Williams. The online ado/data location had been changed twice. Once http://www.indiana.edu/~jslsoc/, and then https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/ . Now the third one is coming. spost13's destiny is like Gypsies.
For spost13's teaching command -spex-, users can edit the spex.ado, and replace the

local data_url "https://jslsoc.sitehost.iu.edu/stata/spex_data/"

with the working directory or somewhere else along the adopath, if you have downloaded all relevant data and put them in working directory or somewhere else.

[Chen Samulsion]

I think it is necessary that Stata corporation put spost13 package and its data collection in official website. They should obtain consent of professor Scott Long and Jeremy Freese, of course. Stata once provide users' website, for example http://www.stata.com/users/becketti http://www.stata.com/users/wgould http://www.stata.com/users/jpitblado http://www.stata.com/users/vwiggins/ They are all staffs in Stata corporation though. I remember Nick Cox has one, but I'm not sure, and I indeed cannot find it now.

[Felix Bittmann]

Thanks a lot for keeping the packages alive! To make the availability of various ados even more robust, one could also mirror the sites and ados using commercial services, like Github or Gitlab.

[Richard Williams]

Scott could always send spost13 to ssc. But, I think he likes to be able to easily update, and he also has (or did have!) support pages. Scott asked me if there was still demand for spost13 and the fact we’ve had 2 or 3 posts about in the short time since it disappeared indicates that there is! The Brant command is ever popular, and I’m also a huge fan of the mtable command. Other features can be very handy too.

some spost13 commands could and should be built into Stata. At a minimum, it should be easy enough to add Brant as a post estimation command.

[Richard Williams]

When you use a university site (or any site you don’t have 100% control of) you are subject to the whims of others. I had to rework 100s of files and handouts when Notre Dame switched from www to www3. You’d think it wouldn’t matter, but Stata use commands would not substitute www3 when you specify www.

on Feb 1, Notre Dame eliminates www3 completely, so my personal website will need a new home. I’ll probably get a new site totally separate from ND. I’ll be retired in a year and I don’t want to be subject to ND whims and requirements. Once I have a new site I will post it here.

At least I have notice. Scott’s site was taken away with no warning and it looks like IU will not be giving it back to him.