On 23/06/12 20:34, Petr Bena wrote:
Yes, the bots are useful for devs, that's the reason why we made them and there is a little point to argue about that. But they aren't useful for other users of #mediawiki especially users who seek help. IMHO #mediawiki should be used for development (bots are probably ok), #wikimedia-dev for wikimedia related developement (some bots are ok) and there should be another channel for mediawiki support, which would be user friendly.
If we keep the bots as they are we won't fix anything (if you think that there is no issue, read the first mail).
If we move the bots to #wikimedia-dev we likely kill the #wikimedia-dev channel, and all #mediawiki devs will loose the track of what's going on (defacto we rename #mediawiki to #wikimedia-dev and most of people who were in #mediawiki will just move to -dev).
If we move the bots to separate channel which would be +m, we will make all channels more usable for regular talk. But some people will find it difficult because they would have to switch channels more often.
The problem is not as much as switching channels, but seeing the changes after the fact, when you'd have liked it 5 minutes earlier. A solution could be to configure each individual to copy -feed messages to the #mediawiki screen, but I'm not fond of that solution. Chad asked for a middle ground, actually there would be a way in irc to make the bot messages to only arrive to some people, but it'd be very hacky. And with any of these, it'd be confusing that people read different things at the same time on the same channel.