Finally, I got there to talk with Angie about this. The solution is as follows: People wanted to have a more quiet place to have development discussions. Let them. But then that place should not be used for anything else but deep development discussions. This is #drupal-dev . Me , Angie and I hope a few others will actively police the channel to keep it the quiet place for development discussions. Let #drupal be whatever it was: devel talk, advocacy, social, one sentence support replies and yes even support? questions. Yes we wanted to avoid this, but there is no way out. If you allow support, any degree of support in #drupal then it eventually leads to having only support in #drupal and that will mean quite some people will avoid it like the plague. While other projects do this, we are much more development focused. The much desired crossover won't happen in this case. I am not happy with not being able to abolish support? question. But if we want newcomers to be faced with development discussions so they can feel being "in the flow" then I fail to see any other solution and the recent discussions and flamewars have not showed any other way. Please, please help us making #drupal an active, friendly place even for newcomers -- give them the chance to become contributors! Regards, NK