On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
In my experience, the bots in the channel are an important part of our workflow -- new bug reports, bug updates, and patches in gerrit. When I'm discussing things in #wikimedia-dev I usually end up having to manually add references to something that a bot already sent to #mediawiki, which is one of the reasons I've always preferred using #mediawiki.
Please don't make yet another split-off channel; that'll be annoying and make things more complicated for little if any benefit.
I think I agree with Brion more than anyone else. I find the bots to be incredibly useful, and jumping back and forth between channels is a pain. Also like I've said multiple times in multiple places over the past couple of days--when you move channels you fracture discussion. It happened with #wikimedia-dev, and it'll happen again here if we don't do this right.
However, I see the argument to be made that if you're not a regular then the bots can be rather annoying to filter out. And honestly, someone who drops in for a few minutes to ask a question shouldn't be asked to /ignore every random bot they see.
Is there some middle ground here?
-Chad