Welcome — what these discussions are for

[hyperpolymath]

The discussions are open. This is a working research tool — an amplicon-sequencing pipeline with a browser UI, a pinned reproducible toolchain, and machine-checked proofs of some of the statistics it uses — and the idea of this space is to make its direction something the people who use it can shape.

The categories:

• General — introduce yourself, and the mathematical foundations thread, where the statistics are argued about properly.
• Ideas — what the tool should do next. Small conveniences and whole research methods both welcome.
• Q&A — setup, usage, and interpretation questions. (A reproducible defect is a bug report, not a Q&A — the bug-report issue template is the door for that.)
• Show and tell — figures, tables, trees, and the stories behind them.
• Polls — when a choice genuinely needs a vote.

Two house norms:

1. Reproducibility courtesy. Every run writes an attestation.yml recording the exact tool versions and content hashes it used. When you ask why your results differ from someone else's, attach yours — it usually settles the question in one reply.
2. Claims get grounded. If a number matters in an argument, say what produced it — command, version, data. The repository holds its own analyses to that standard; the discussions can too.

Maintainer updates and release notes will land in Announcements. Everything else is yours.