+1 Courtesy: Useless replies Dept. On 7/31/07, Angela Byron <drupal-devel@webchick.net> wrote:
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
-- Robin Monks @ www.civicspacelabs.org @ www.gmking.org @ www.multimediachurches.org Fax: (419) 791-8076 "Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might." ~ Ephesians 6:10