Our Zulip instance at python.zulipchat.com seems to be getting very little traffic these days. Maybe it’s time to end the experiment?
(Update: There’s traffic, but it’s all from bots, e.g. there’s an IRC gateway and various channels that report commits, PRs, test runs and the like. Not sure if these are valuable (I had them all filtered out).)
What is the cost of keeping it?
It’s another thing to watch for us, and for outsiders it presents an extra choice for where to go with questions.
If nobody watches it, people occasionally ask a question there and won’t get an answer.
Otherwise, some folks need to monitor it and help answer questions if they come up, but this is not a good use of their time.
There is no “community” there, basically.
My vote is to drop it. I’ve been lurking there every now again, mostly talking to Ned while orchestrating releases but we can do it just as easily on IRC.
Unfortunately, I must agree that in its current state it would be better to close the Python Zulip instance.
I like Zulip very much, and I’ve had some great conversations there, that I don’t believe would have happened on IRC. But the amount of traffic there is abysmally low, to the point where it really isn’t worth keeping around unless we direct more people to it somehow.
I’ll make it a point on the agenda on the next Steering Council meeting. If the SC agrees to drop it, we’ll instruct Ernest (or whoever manages it, perhaps the nice folks at zulip.org) to take it down.
The outgoing SC discussed this; at @sumanah’s request we decided to keep it around for 6 months (and then reassess), but the core dev team won’t be monitoring it. Somebody should post an announcement there indicating this (that the core dev team doesn’t monitor this).