| 20 Feb 2024 |
 @joepie91:pixie.town | In reply to @adam:robins.wtf
are we unnecessarily punishing ourselves by trying to support the lowest client feature set? threads are broken even in element, and there are design-level issues with it - the threads problem is complex and I'm concerned that talking about the details of that problem might strand the conversation in technical minutiae with no actual short-term solution | 17:01:37 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | (seen that happen a couple times in various places already) | 17:01:59 |
 @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
the suggestion has been brought up a few times over the past year or two to have a support question room separate from an on-topic discussion room. has that ever been evaluated before? Where and how would you draw the line between these? | 17:04:43 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | piegames: if I am understanding the complaint correctly - support questions getting drowned in discussions that are orders of magnitude bigger than the question/answer process of a technical question - then I don't think that an exactly-defined boundary would be necessary; it could be defined as "please move the discussion if someone asks you to" | 17:06:17 |
 adamcstephens | would you need to even draw a line? or would just having a channel named support inevitably steer most of the discussion there | 17:06:28 |
| adamcstephens | though i'd wonder what the point of the nix room would be then.... | 17:06:56 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | (the "orders of magnitude bigger" being the reason I think this could work, and it would be identifiable to people as a problem without exact guidelines) | 17:06:59 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | One idea I have in mind, not sure if it would work out, is to see the #nix:nixos.org main channel as a "hub" and entry point to the community. Discussion in there would be discouraged, while eagerly redirecting people to smaller topic-specific channels. However this would require a bit of human support | 17:07:03 |
| adamcstephens | what if #nix is a read-only room that has a message that guides users? | 17:07:51 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | piegames: I think that is unlikely to succeed, based on past experiences; when people try to implement this in technical communities, the usual issue they run into is that people who join to ask a question often don't have much time or energy to spend on understanding the details of how the community fits together (they are just looking for help) and so it tends to just be a source of conflict, that repeats itself a lot because there are so many 'drive-by askers' | 17:08:40 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | it would probably work a lot better for communities where people join for reasons other than "I need an X now" | 17:09:02 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | same reason I think that "make the main channel a support channel and have a separate channel for discussions" would work better than the other way around | 17:09:34 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
piegames: if I am understanding the complaint correctly - support questions getting drowned in discussions that are orders of magnitude bigger than the question/answer process of a technical question - then I don't think that an exactly-defined boundary would be necessary; it could be defined as "please move the discussion if someone asks you to" Another issue I see is that we may still have this problem within support questions or within general Nix discussions. I don't know how it is here since I don't really ask for support, but I made this experience in other FOSS communities. Sometimes my questions get drowned in other unrelated questions, or they'll get lost in the backlog as soon as the next person asks a question etc. | 17:09:42 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | yeah, the question volume is always a tricky one, I have not really seen any good solutions to that anywhere | 17:10:17 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
same reason I think that "make the main channel a support channel and have a separate channel for discussions" would work better than the other way around Oh I see. Yeah, agreed on that. The same way we already split out the Dev channel | 17:10:27 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | most places seem to settle on "you can ask again in X time" as a set rule | 17:10:26 |
 @patka_123:matrix.org | In reply to @adam:robins.wtf
what if #nix is a read-only room that has a message that guides users? I don't think theres even a way to disable join and avatar change messages... So you'd have to scroll up half an hour to find the message. | 17:10:41 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @patka_123:matrix.org
I don't think theres even a way to disable join and avatar change messages... So you'd have to scroll up half an hour to find the message. That's a client rendering setting, but agreed | 17:11:08 |
| adamcstephens | ahh yeah, i forget about those since i have them turned off on the client | 17:11:08 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
most places seem to settle on "you can ask again in X time" as a set rule (and this works 'okay' at best, but I've also not really seen anything that works better in practice) | 17:11:37 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @piegames:matrix.org
Oh I see. Yeah, agreed on that. The same way we already split out the Dev channel Let's think this further. How would you name such a channel? | 17:12:04 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | "Nix/NixOS (Extended discussion)"? I think that would make the purpose immediately clear, at least in the context of a "you should move there when asked" rule | 17:12:55 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | Also would you suggest to keep the current #nix:nixos.org channel as is or explicitly mark it as a support channel? | 17:14:07 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | I suspect that support questions will end up there no matter what we do, but if we have a "move if asked" rule, it would probably be a good idea to highlight that expectation in the topic so that it doesn't become a matter of contention | 17:15:00 |
| adamcstephens | i would think #support:nixos.org would be a more ideal name for a support channel | 17:15:08 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | something like "primarily for support questions, please move extended discussion to #whatever if asked" | 17:15:29 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @adam:robins.wtf
i would think #support:nixos.org would be a more ideal name for a support channel We can change the name, but I think that joepie has a point in that this should be the main entry point to our community regardless of name, because people are going to ask support questions in that channel anyways | 17:16:39 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | (the goal being to avoid the room drowning in meta discussions instead of nix discussions) | 17:16:41 |
| adamcstephens | would it be helpful to have a bot that sends a welcome message the first time they join the space/channel ? | 17:17:40 |
 @fractivore:cyberia.club | The topic was already changed to something more clear, which is good, but personally I'm all about making this stuff more obvious so it doesn't require explanation/orientation whenever possible | 17:18:02 |
