Maybe it is an overreaction. My perception is that there’s a group of people in this forum as part of their job[1], while the rest of us are in this forum to avoid doing our jobs .
For the “job” folks, the SNR of Ideas is interfering with their ability to do their work. For everyone else it can just be a mild annoyance. Improving the separation of serious ideas from idle musings is most useful for e.g. core devs who might sponsor a PEP.
The move from a mailing list to Discourse probably exacerbated this by greatly expanding the audience of people who can find and participate in discussions. It’s a welcoming community, it seems like a great place to start any discussion you can think of. But there are multiple use-cases operating at cross purposes.
not necessarily full-time, but python development is a professional responsibility ↩︎
I don’t think it’s that hard, because people who have serious ideas without access to “Proper Ideas” are still welcomed to post them in “Proto-Ideas”. Their post can be moved to “Proper Ideas” at a moderator’s discretion, with the help of community flags to get their attention.
To address this, I suggest that once someone has made a proto-idea that is moved to “Proper Ideas”, we grant them permanent access to it as well. The idea is that if they have written a high-quality idea once, we expect that they’ve understood the standard and will keep that standard for future posts. This way, “Proper Ideas” is not a closed category, it’s just restricted to trusted people, and this trust can be gained purely by good behavior on this forum.
I expect 90% of users who are capable of writing high-quality ideas will eventually have access. They just have to go through this “graduation” process.
(Of course core-devs automatically have access without having to go through this process.)
Nope, we’re all here as volunteers. Personally, I participate because I like talking to people about ideas for improving Python. I help newcomers because I want them to share the enjoyment I feel, and maybe get as much from contributing to Python as I have over the years.
What completely discourages me is people who act as if it’s my job, and that they have some sort of right to leave doing the hard work (researching the practicalities of implementing a proposal, any previous discussions, how it would fit into Python, etc, etc) to others. That’s when I wonder why I bother.
You’re expecting a lot of additional work from the moderators. Community flags will be of limited value, because the people whose views would carry the most weight are precisely the people who won’t want to follow the “Proto-Ideas” category.
I don’t think it’s any more than now. Now everyone posts in Ideas and moderators have to move unqualified posts to Help; what I suggest is the reverse.
You didn’t say anything about moderator work to @jamestwebber’s suggestion, I didn’t expect you would for mine, because I basically agree with his idea. What I add is that once someone has had a post moved from Proto-Ideas to Proper Ideas, they should be granted permanent access to it as well, which will reduce moderator’s work, not increase it.
No, moving between Ideas and Python Help is something that trusted users can easily do, which just means that person is an active participator. An actually restricted category would mean more work for the 4 (?) actual moderators. Unless ofcourse you mean “restricted to trusted users”, where I am not sure how valuable that is all-in-all.
Thought inspired by a recent thread: is it possible to give two names to the same category? Maybe we just need Python Help and “general discussion” to point to the same set of posts…
It is already there: ‘General help/discussion…’. If you use questions like ‘How?’, ‘What?’, or ‘Why?’, that is almost always the right place to ask these questions, and Ideas is definitely not.
Yesterday, I wanted to parse some yaml and found it surprising that no serialize/deserialize module to do that (similar to json) exists in the stdlib.
Presuming that the idea may have been raised before, I search the cpython issues : I found nothing relevant.
I search the Discourse threads, obviously excluding the Help section since I have no interest in threads asking how to use one of the popular third-party libraries, and filter only on the Ideas section : nothing.
So, I write a new thread proposing that.
As a result of this thread’s policy, my thread is moved to Help as well, and it is revealed to me that a thread from four days earlier proposing the exact same thing had been moved there as well. (and then my idea was dismissed for simple reasons but that’s not the point)
The obvious issue being that if that earlier thread had not been moved, I would not have written the thread.
Implementing a threads triage before a Pre-Ideas or Proto-Ideas section exists and while the Ideas section’s description still reads “Would you like to change something in Python? This might be your feedback forum.”, in my opinion and as a result of that experience, is possibly the worst policy possible.
It wastes everyone’s time:
the users of Ideas (myself included), who don’t see the previous discussions and waste time writing new propositions
the mods, who need to triage more threads
the Help section users, who get flooded even more than before.
I also fail to see a cogent precise boundary between proto ideas and proper ideas, so I +1 the idea that it would result in inconsistent triage and pointless discussions. It also would separate the pool of threads in two, which impedes searching across it. And overflowing it to Help - even if it were called “Discussions”, which it is not - is the last thing to do.
I would more favor a new tag, within the Ideas section, which you can filter on if you want to, to denote “proper” ideas - whatever the definition you keep for that concept. That way ideas are still in Ideas, the distinction is less prone to conflicts, but you can still filter out simpler ideas if you want.
How about locking such threads and leaving them in ideas? For the time being.
Then they can be found and discussion can continue in the intended place.
If the idea is not mature enough, locking the thread won’t help.
In the case where we do separate Ideas in two sections, there would be the locked thread in proper ideas section and a live thread in the proto section, if I understand what you’re saying correctly.
That’s not a good solution for the duplication of the namespaces to look into to check if an idea has already been proposed. That would defeat the initial purpose of cleaning up the (proper) Ideas section, and yield an even greater number of threads overall.
I was talking about right now. If the YAML thread was locked and a new thread was created in help, you would’ve found the former and read the discussion in the latter.
I don’t see this as an obvious exclusion. As you have seen, the Help section is the place for questions about this sort of thing.
Creating a new section will only make things worse since there are now myriad old threads in Help and Ideas, and now people have to search all three places. You gain nothing.
Oh, right. Well, I disagree about moving the discussion away from Ideas at all, and it still leaves a duplication of threads in the short term, but I guess that’s better than the current policy.
As long as the Ideas section is described as “Would you like to change something in Python? This might be your feedback forum.”, it is not.
And as long as Help is the place where you get a myriad of threads asking for help for the use of the Python features and libraries (standard or not), it is definitely not.
As of now I don’t think creating a new section is good idea. Maybe it should to be reconsidered later if things still go very wrong.
For now I think what can be done:
a) Rename “Help” to “Help & Discussions”. If it is this, then I think it should be named as such to avoid confusion.
b) Keep moving unbaked ideas to help. If people don’t do a minimal research before proposing an idea, new section will not be helpful. I think such cases don’t deserve place in “Provisional Ideas” either. If the bare minimum about ones proposal is not known by the OP, then it belongs in “Help” - its less than 1% baked.
What about renaming help to “help and discussions” and renaming ideas to “proposals” or even “formal proposals” with a list of clearly specified criteria for a formal proposal?
Edit: and instructions to take non fully formed proposals to the discussion section.
I think a pinned post in ideas could be useful. Listing you should look on the mailing list and Discourse. Try to look for GitHub usage, check if this isn’t just an alternative way to write it. If you can’t put it on PyPi first. Read similar discussions. List benefits, give an example.
I like this. Because this leaves “Ideas / Proposals” with a certain quality posts. And for filtering, instead of having tags in ideas, why not have tags in “Help and Discussions”?
Then “Ideas / Proposals” have a certain standard.
And “Help and Discussions” have Help, Discussion and Proto-Ideas tags.
I oppose having threads that are expected to be found by a search, be drowned in the help requests (or with or along, with your proposition). Help channels are spammy and overflowing by nature. Anything that can’t be filtered off is doomed to be impossible to find - or impossible to be reasonably expected to be found.
In that case there should at least be a separation between Help and the general discussion, in two different sections.
But the boundaries around the current Ideas section, which are basically “anything about change ideas that are not finished enough to go to PEP or otherwise do not qualify for CoreDevelopment”, should definitely be kept. If you want to make a first-class inside that, then it should be a subsection of Ideas (or a tag, or some other implementation).
It’s Ideas that should be divvied up, not Help. Even if Help and Discussions are separated as I mentioned above, ideas should remain in Ideas.
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