On 12/22/05, Ashar Voultoiz hashar@altern.org wrote:
I think we could use a dedicated mailing-list where only devs / sysadmin would be able to post (rest will be heavily moderated). Then when someone do something important, he can send an email to that list and will be sure everyone will know about it. The server admin log on wikitech is just about that, but for the farm only.
I tried setting up a developer-only IRC channel some time ago (#mediawiki-dev), it didn't work out at the time, for reasons that became obvious to me at a later point (the people who know what I'm talking about, well, know what I'm talking about:).
The reason I think it would be a good idea to have an open development channel that would be moderated (people would basically get +v if they contributed something more valuable than "how do I set my sidebar items" to the discussion) is that it would avoid a lot of the entropy we get from user support questions that drown out real development discussion in #mediawiki. I think it's commendable that people are interested in helping end users with their in-the-manual-you-could-have-found-it-with-two-minutes-of-searching-on-google-or-meta questions, I'm just not were interested in it, and I'm sure there are others that feel the same.
Anyway getting back to your suggestion, I sort-of-agree, we have private-l for well, private stuff:) and then we have the zoo at wikitech-l, one would think that there needs to be some middle ground, however I haven't seen it working out in practice, if we take #mediawiki and #wikimedia-tech for example a lot of the discussion that "should" be in one channel ends up in the other, and more often than not people just crosspost their support questions to all the forums rather than picking the appropriate one, if this is to be done it needs, as you suggested, to be moderated.