Hey all, This post is going to walk through all the details associated with the archiving of the helpdesk channel on the Julia Language’s Slack. Before we go into why this decision is being made, let’s talk about what our public Slack workspace has done for us so far. When Jon originally created t…

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful feedback and comments. We will hold off on closing Helpdesk (I’ll update the title above to reflect this so as not to confuse folks reading this in the future). However, the core issue of scalability still remains. If you are interested in working on this issue, f…

Just to echo some of the things that @logankilpatrick is saying: two weeks ago I gave a “Julia evangelism” talk, and more than one person mentioned that the biggest problem with Julia is that the StackOverflow community is too tiny to be useful. I’m not sure I fully agree, but FWIW another participa…

I think it is a pipe dream that shutting down #helpdesk will suddenly boost SO by a lot. Firstly, SO type of questions tend to be asked on discourse anyway (discourse is the biggest competitor to SO, not #helpdeks). Secondly, people will just go to Zulip where the community there has already said …

I really don’t understand the critics about Julia tag in StackOverflow, it has a remarkably low fraction of unanswered questions, 14.7% as of this writing . For comparison, among the top 20 tags , only [c++] , [arrays] and [c] come close with 19.5%, 18.2% and 16.8%, all others float around 25-35% of u…

How about a julia points bounty for posting good questions that come up in chat platforms to stack overflow? On slack/Zulip… User: how can I do X? Answerer: Do Y Community pirate: Great question and answer. If you post it to stack overflow, you can collect a bounty. Just submit the link of the c…

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 whereve…

So far, all the people I consider Julia stewards who actually use Slack regularly, e.g. Stefan, Kristoffer, Frederick, etc, have all come out with unfavorable opinions about this move so whoever made this decision, did so as a Slack outsider. Let Slack be Slack, let Zulip be Zulip, let Discourse be …

I just want to point out that neither me, nor Kristoffer, are Julia Stewards (I don’t think that is what you meant, but just want to be clear since that is usually what the terms is used for). I do agree, however, that it is strange that this decision comes from people that are (from what I have see…

[image] tim.holy: the StackOverflow community is too tiny to be useful In fact I think the julia SO is pretty incredible in terms of response time. I gave up earning SO points on Julia like a year ago, because the time window from a question is posed to it has a high-quality answer was simply…

One theme I’ve noticed is that people are mentioned that “quick” questions are for Slack and “detailed” questions are for Discourse. Perhaps that disconnect is part of the hesitancy toward this decision. I might submit this to the #confessions Slack channel, but probably 50% of my Discourse searches…

Out of curiosity, how do other programming language communities handle the divide between Stack Overflow and their language-specific Discourse? For example, the Rust community has a Discourse. Actually they have two: one for usage and one for internals . The “usage” Discourse is where helpdesk/Q&A q…

#Helpdesk channel on Slack (proposal to close the channel)

Community

logankilpatrick January 18, 2021, 8:21pm 62

A proposal with details on a more user friendly solution to this problem can be found here: Bridging Slack's #Helpdesk and Discourse (Proposal, feedback welcome!)

Topic		Replies	Views
Bridging Slack's #Helpdesk and Discourse (Proposal, feedback welcome!) Community question , announcement	49	3744	May 17, 2021
Why a 10,000 message limit promotes better communication for large communities Community	17	2297	May 5, 2020
Slack and the value of community heritage Community	37	2797	May 11, 2021
I've heard a number of people say Julia is not mainstream because it doesn't have many stackoverflow questions answered but they don't know about discourse Teaching & Outreach	21	2507	January 18, 2021
Would it be better to redirect all new Julia usage questions to Stack Overflow? Meta Discussion question	33	3608	June 28, 2021

#Helpdesk channel on Slack (proposal to close the channel)

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