I see a pretty heavy divide here.
Ideas:
- Zulip has a learning curve. People learning Julia may get frustrated to find they now need to learn a new chat tool to get help(or go to discourse)
- Closing Helpdesk might not actually do anything? People will now post their questions in #General or wherever else?
- It is crazy to have the Slack history delete everything from an efficiency point of view, but also somewhat liberating. IE: there’s no record lasting until the apocalypse of someone asking a “dumb” question.
Conclusions - It seems like the “best” solution is to either create a tool or find a tool that allows questions to be cached. Imagine a little button that a question asker could press to create a discourse thread or some other more permanent medium(slack wouldn’t allow this). Maybe the 80/20 answer is Zulip?
- StackOverflow is nice - but it’s a little rough when the syntax has changed so much. At the expense of more knowledge SO is often far more concise than a discourse thread. Often the most upvoted answers do not apply to Julia > 1.0. A community-driven cleanup could be in order(upvote stuff that works in Julia 1, reanswer questions that predate Julia 1.0)?