* Shut
down #wikimedia-dev (formerly #wikipedia_usability, kind of).
The explicit purpose of the channel is to allow development discussion
with less noise, but "noise" here means community involvement. In
community development, you do get a lot more discussion, but that's
not something you should try avoiding. In general, use existing
discussion fora wherever possible, and if you do fragment them, make
sure you don't have too much of a staff-volunteer split in which fora
people use.
No, "noise" means bots and people trying to support people
with
questions like "how do I disable anon reads on my wiki" as opposed to
developers (paid and unpaid alike) being engaged in a design
discussion. Maybe #wikimedia-dev should be renamed to #mediawiki-dev
to remove the suggestion of WMF-exclusivity, but I definitely see the
value of a channel dedicated to communication between developers with
support questions and bots kept out.