On 12/22/05, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar(a)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.