This morning, I had hoped to reply to the thread, Welcoming the Supporting Developer in Residence, with a note of appreciation to Serhiy Storchaka for previous work contributed to the Python community, along with congratulations for being selected for the new role of Supporting Developer in Residence. In addition, the note would express appreciation to Łukasz Langa and all others involved for their efforts that made this possible. However, replies with the Committers category are not open to the general user.
Would it be possible to open specific announcements of noteworthy appointments and accomplishments, such as that one, to replies from the general community, without incurring any undue difficulty or unwanted side effects? After all, through their hard work, all members of the groups and committees in the Python community offer great benefit to everyone, and deserve statements of recognition for it from the general community.
If such an exception regarding allowed replies is not practical, that is understood. In that case, please consider this post to be an expression of the appreciation and congratulations described above.
I know what you’re going for here and I appreciate your feedback regarding Serhiy.
We have a Committers category to provide a channel of communication between core developers. The fact that it’s world-visible is a function of Python being truly open. However, there is no expectation of external participation there. We have the Core Development / PEPs / Packaging / Typing / and others for this purpose.
We have a small staff of only a few moderators. Fighting spam and helping confused users who post in the wrong place are both daily activities for us. One important effect of the current setting of Committers is that it minimizes the need to moderate this part of the forum. Sure, core devs sometimes also require some moderation help, but this is a much less labor-intensive part of our work. Sadly, there isn’t a good way to customize permissions for a single topic within a category. This would require throwing out the existing permissions and manually moderating each new topic and reply. This is the opposite of what we want with the Committers category.
For what its worth, while changing the permissions in Committers for a single post is clearly thoroughly impractical (as you mention), there is one potentially-viable alternative that might be worth thinking about—cross-posting announcements like that to another open category (e.g. Core Development , or PSF )? That way, core devs see the message and don’t get spammed, but there’s also a place for the wider community to express congratulations and well-wishes to our well-deserving compatriots? Or at least would we want to welcome community member doing so, if they wish to provide a venue for such?