So there’s a rather long winded discussion thread currently on Slack about this bridgebot, and I’d like to just copy over a couple points I made there to here for posterity.
I think that the Bridge-Bot is creating a flood of noisy, unhelpful, low quality posts on this Discourse that have a very low likelihood of being useful to future people. With most of these posts, if they were created by a human, the first response would be to link to Please read: make it easier to help you because the post does not meet the sort of quality expectations that this Discourse community has.
One major problem is the titles. If any of these threads appeared in your search results when looking for something, it’d almost never be obvious if the thread contained any useful information:
But I think beyond that, a very large number of these threads never get responded to on Discourse, and after a couple of weeks, the thread is lost on Slack, so we end up with a bunch of threads that’ll pile up that just consist of a unhelpful title, a vague question and no answer. Personally, I find that Discourse’s search functionality is already really unhelpful and I worry about these posts further cluttering search results and making it harder to find valuable information.
I think at minimum, we should be automatically deleting bridged threads older than two weeks that were never responded to.
More broadly though, I still worry about the idea of shoehorning Slack posts into Discourse because of the huge cultural differences between the two communities on what is considered to be a valid, or acceptably asked question