Perhaps it’s time for PEPPs (Python Enhancement Proposal Proposals), PEPPs (Python Enhancement Proposal Proposal Proposals), and so on. 
You jest, but that’s literally the scenario we created when we added the sponsorship requirement to PEP 1: a pre-PEP without a sponsor yet is a proposal to make a proposal. And an Ideas thread that’s suggesting a PEP level change may result in a post in the relevant thread that is a proposal to make a proposal to make a proposal.
It’s proposals all the way down
Another option is to add a new section along the lines of “Playground”. This way, there would be no disturbance to the status quo and such place would cover a larger scope of threads that are currently having a hard time to fit in.
It would a place for:
- Brainstorming unbaked ideas (The root issue of this thread)
- competitions, code golfs
- casual discussions on stuff that does not fit into any of the categories E.g.
Can I write fun / esoteric python code here?
Generally, all of the stuff that doesn’t fit well into any of the current sections would go there.
Such:
- Would save moderators headache moderating “Serious sections”
- Coredevs could just not go there if they don’t want to waste their time over unbaked concepts
- “Help” would be clean of topics that are not actually “People seeking help”
I don’t think any new sections are necessary. Python Help could be renamed to something like “Help and general Python discussion”, signaling that it’s not only for help topics; we already have the help tag to distinguish such topics.
Thus far, the longest category title is “Welcome to Discourse!” at 21 characters. “Help and general Python discussion” contains 34 characters. There is some advantage with ease of reading a list in which the titles are short. “Playground” might work as a short title, so long as it is understood as being a general category, rather than primarily as a place for writing and executing experimental code.
If there is a name change, it should still contain “help” in some way. It used to be called something else, “General discussion” or the like, but was renamed because requests for help ended up getting posted in the wrong subforums.
I’m not actually convinced there is a problem to be solved here. Yes, the noise-to-signal ratio in Ideas is pretty high these days, and as a result it’s hard to get core dev attention for a proposal that’s ready to progress to the PEP stage. But is that actually a bad thing? Python is a mature language at this point, and ambitious changes are unlikely to be accepted anyway, unless they have a very motivated person (or group of people) behind them. Having to work through Ideas and get that core dev attention, is a good test of the motivation of the proposer.
And in the meantime, the other people proposing things on the Ideas category are having fun discussing language design - and that’s a good thing, that we should encourage. If we’re not doing this for fun, why bother?
Also, splitting things up into more lists probably won’t help as much as people seem to expect. If someone has an idea, they naturally gravitate to the highest “level” of forum that they feel comfortable with. To make an “Ideas nearly ready for a PEP” category work, we’d ironically have to deliberately make it less welcoming to the average user, which is not (IMO) what we want. After all, the Ideas category (or more accurately, the python-ideas mailing list) was created as just that - a place that wasn’t as noisy as python-list (the precursor to the Help category), for people with solid ideas for new language features. And over time, it became just as noisy, just with more of a focus on “language ideas” rather than “general help”. Why would we expect a new category to have a different fate?
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Because discourse actually has a decent solution for users (i.e. non-moderators) to help sort this. There are a few hundred[1] users who have the ability to move around topics between categories.
The issue is that the general help category does not feel like a good move target for many (myself included) and there has never been a clear communication by the mods that this is something we should be doing.
I think, haven’t checked recently ↩︎
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Hard to gauge but judging by how rarely non-moderators do move things, I don’t get the impression that many of that few hundred feel comfortable using that power. I personally can do it but doubt I ever will for anything less unambiguous than a “how to concatenate two strings?” question posted into the PEPs category. I’d feel even less confident if I had to choose between sort of ideas and more fully baked ideas categories. The distinction between Help and Ideas is already blurry since most ideas are just people on the wrong side of the X/Y problem (turning their feature proposals into a “how should I really solve this problem?” question).
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This would also improve with proper guidelines by the moderators on this. The goal is not to be perfect , but to improve the situation.
But as I said before, I don’t believe that this specific discussion is going to lead to anything useful do I am going to bow out. I just wanted to highlight why degradation of quality in mailing lists does not automatically translate to the same effect here.
(Edit: I personally don’t move topics that often specifically because I am slightly annoyed by the lacking communication by the moderators on this)
Agreed, I think “Ideas” itself is currently working as intended (hence feeling it should be left alone).
The only potential gaps I see are around the later stages of the pre-PEP process steps:
- getting advice on preparing a good first draft of a PEP PR
- seeking sponsors for submission of PEP-ready ideas that haven’t otherwise found a sponsor
Those could just be thread labels within the “Ideas” category rather than being split out to their own category, though.
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