is there a particular place in DPO where i can just nerd out on what i’m working out? is it really python-help?
it doesn’t really feel like the best place since it’s cluttered with people asking for help and i feel that will prevent visbility with people who tend to be more experienced in python / lurk in other parts of DPO.
It really is just the help category (which is treated as a catch-all). FWIW, you have to actively mute the help category to not see it in the /latest feed so I wouldn’t really call it significantly less visible.
The Powers That Be have, best I can tell, always opposed opening this platform to general discussions.. Like, e.g, here:
So, ya, Python Help is it. I get my needs to “just talk” met by private mailing lists. On Discourse, the DM system can be used for private conversations among people selected in advance. People can leave such a group as they please. Really quite a nice way to carry on discussion with limited appeal, with limited groups. But they’re not publicly visible.
Yeah, it’s been brought up several times:
Thanks for the response, I’ll end up just posting there then.
I see, seems like people are asking for it, I wonder what holds the admins back.
It’s work for the moderators. Users flagging posts requires the volunteer “spare time” mods looking into why, and whether the flags should be cleared, and whether the flagged poster needs to be “talked to”, or even suspended. More time and more work for them.
They’re keen on moderation here, and shudder at the prospect of having many more posts in need of their attention, and probably especially so in a new category where people would feel freer to just “have fun” (which is bound to offend some people, reasonably so or not, but either way it takes moderator time and attention and work to resolve).
I’d personally take a stab at having a new category with a policy of letting the automated “hidden by community flags” have its way, with no moderator attention unless explicitly asked to. Indirect moderation by the community. Open to “flag abuse”, but that’s a tradeoff to consider. Then again, “one size fits all” is corporate policy in almost all organizations.
I wonder if renaming “Python Help” to something like “Generic Python Discussions” would improve the current status. The way I see it, those who know know that Python Help is the current catch-all, fallback, default category but it does not seem obvious just by the name. The description is a bit more clear but not by much. I feel like such a renaming has been suggested already.
But also I agree that it seems fair to want to keep discuss.python.org’s focus as close as possible to the core concerns of developing Python itself rather than developing in Python. There are indeed many other places available on the internet, that likely have much more moderation resources available and can afford to host a much wider range of Python-related discussions.
It seems like this is coming full-circle to the beginning. It was renamed to “help” because the bulk of the people who don’t know what topic to post in are newcomers looking for help with Python, and the general users topic wasn’t the obvious place for them to do that so they would post random questions in Python Software Foundation or Core Development or any of a number of other inappropriate topics instead.
After everything else was tried to persuade, redirect or pre-educate them, renaming the topic to help was the one thing that seemed to actually work as a honeypot to (mostly) keep them from flooding the other topics.
You’re welcome to nerd out on r/Python. Although it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I enjoy trying to make it less… bad in my off hours 
will do that!