A couple weeks ago, a few developers started going into #drupal-dev
instead of #drupal and started a campaign to get people to split off.
I guess the reasoning for this was because they disagreed with
newbies who didn't read the topic getting 'support?' in their face
when they join our "official" channel. I personally think it is a
feature, and not a bug, that our main channel is contribution-focused
rather than support-focused, but that is largely irrelevant to the
topic at hand.

The problem is that the people who started this 'fork' have not been
present in #drupal, actively taking part in support requests from
newbies, thus changing the 'mood' of the channel by their own words
in actions. Instead, the main channel's merely been abandoned by
several very prominent contributors, a large portion of the
development community doesn't even realize there's a separate
channel, development discussion in general is now splintered between
the channels, and newbies are still getting 'support?' in #drupal.

The climate in the 'official' channel right now is more that of a
ghost town of join/part messages, except for random musings about the
infrastructure and, of course, 'support?'. This gives the exact
opposite impression to new Drupal users than the channel did before
the split -- a vibrant community of developers sharing issues or
patches to review, talking about new modules they're developing, etc.

So please, #drupal-dev goers, either finish what you started by
actively working in #drupal to make it more newbie-friendly, or
abandon the experiment. So far, this feels like a net loss for the
community.

-Angie