It’s hard to quantify/know if a question will help someone in the future. Assuming it will seems to be the safest/most efficient assumption to make.
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For me the friction doesn’t come from Discourse not being welcoming but rather from the format of the platform. One has to individually open each topic (there’s no stream that one can semi-passively watch), I, and I think many others, have Slack/Zulip open a lot for other reasons anyway, so it’s easy to combine asking/answering with that. Going to Discourse is a more active decision, especially for answering questions.
Simple and common questions aren’t necessarily the same. Say I run into a syntax error, that’d be a very specific, yet simple, question that I’d probably not post to Discourse.
Extracting this from Zulip: Could you elaborate a bit on who was involved in this decision and how it was made? It feels very top-down to me for something that impacts the entire community but I don’t know if that was actually the case or not.
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Thank you for this thoughtful response. The exclusionary point you made is especially interesting. The other side of your point is what I already mentioned: some folks may not be comfortable at all posting so having questions pre-answered online already will actually increase diversity and our inclusion by making the language itself more accessible. There’s also folks who may simply give up if they cannot find the answer to their question so the more questions we have online, the lesser the chance of that.
We should indeed try our very best to be welcoming and kind to folks posting questions in general. I don’t know what can be said beyond this but I agree that we need to do it delicately.
We also indeed need to keep track of traffic and such in different places to understand the impact of this transition.
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I consulted and had a discussion with a few folks in the community that I trust and respect. Many of the same concerns being voiced here were voiced by them.
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On a side note, I find the Slack -> Zulip transition somewhat similar to the Python -> Julia transition. Folks are aware of the benefits, and yet they decide to keep insisting on the old approach to things by proposing workarounds like “don’t use feature X because it will harm your performance”.
Whoever thought that Slack should still be promoted as a social space for the Julia community after alternatives have been naturally chosen by the community, should also ask if they are being inconsistent with the mindset of this same community. Don’t take this comment as a personal attack, it is a sincere discomfort with this whole situation around Slack, and the repeated incentives around this distracting platform of communication.
P.S.: @logankilpatrick I know you are not the person leading the Slack movement, just to be clear that your work is super valuable to this community.
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I am also curious about this, and, in particular, why a decision had to be made at all?
The community has organically created and formed the #helpdesk channel, and it is evident from the popularity of the channel that this is something that the community think is useful and that the community want. This is also what most commenters in this thread seems to think. Shouldn’t this be supported instead of beeing shut down?
A couple of months ago the idea of shutting down #helpdesk was proposed and discussed on Slack. From what I recall the response was similar to this thread – this decision goes against what the general community wants. Can you elaborate on why this is happening even after such negative feedback from the community?
All of Slack is essentially a helpdesk where #helpdesk is just the Julia beginner channel (entry channel) and the rest are for more advanced usage questions. If we are not supposed to ask questions in Slack anymore, can you elaborate on what Slack should now be used for?
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I agree the suggested message could be interpreted as somewhat “stiff” or “cold”. That said, I think riffing on the theme and using more informal/conversational language to engage question askers could alleviate some of the perceived unfriendliness. e.g. “Welcome!” or “do you mind…discourse/Zulip”. Certain communities (Rust comes to mind) are very good at this and also have a reputation for being beginner-friendly.
This is kind of orthogonal to the helpdesk platform debate I suppose, but might be worth a try for folks who want to redirect questions out of general, random, etc.
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Zulip is by no means universally better than slack. It does have some benefits, but they do also have a horrible android app, sluggish web ui for some people, and most people also use other slack workspaces. The same goes for Python, I do use it sometimes because my colleagues have written code I want to use, and interacting with colleagues and their code is important.
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Why not have another Slack workspace, “Julia for Beginners”? As people here said, all of Slack is pretty much a helpdesk or quick discussion platform. If the beginner questions traffic is too high, it can be moved to its own workspace imo.
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[tomorrow]
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@baggepinnen I didn’t say that Zulip was universally better. I said it was naturally chosen by the community. We all know it has its problems, but the community is working on them, and has the power to improve upon the status quo. Slack is a business and we have no saying in what they add or remove from the experience.
As others said, let’s not start a Slack vs. Zulip debate because that is not the core of the issue here 
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Yes, is it also the intent of this proposal that we start redirecting questions about DataFrames.jl that are posted in data to Discourse?
And questions about defining custom adjoints that are asked in autodiff?
If so that then begs the question of “what is a question and what is a discussion?”
Or if it is just #helpdesk then that is easier since those are all questions.
But on the other hand does that mean we end up overly biasing discourse to be full of beginner questions?
If all the more advanced ones stay on slack.
But maybe that is a problem for later.
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This seems like a good idea. Usually when I am stuck with a R or python question, I am simply a google search away from finding my answer. Somewhere, somehow in the depths of the internet someone had come across my problem and solved it.
That usually isn’t the case with Julia. For example, when I am stuck on how to transform a dataframe, a google search may not get me my answer (or it may get me an answer from an older version which may not be applicable anymore). Thus, I usually resort to #helpdesk since it’s just so much easier (and faster) to get a quick answer. It would be great to have that on discourse instead so that it’s indexable and picked up by search engines.
I understand that by shutting down #Helpdesk, it causes short term pain to users, especially beginners. However, over time a repository of questions/answers will be built up on discourse, stackover, and reddit. This will also make Julia more discoverable by new users and highlight the activeness of the community. I think this is worth doing, and plus we’ll have the Zulip channel for those who really want a quick answer.
Orthogonally, I would also propose an idea which I think all languages should implement. The examples from the docs are great, however I wonder if its possible to include functionality (say in Documenter.jl) to have community submitted code snippets for various tasks. There are so many great answers on #data for manipulation of dataframes that are eventually going to get lost. Those code snippets could easily be submitted to the docs as community submitted.
I remember back in the .NET 2.0 days, MSDN use to have something like that. Not sure if they still have it.
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Second draft, based on the feedback above:
Would you mind please posting this question on the Julia Discourse forum (https://discourse.julialang.org/)? This will make it easier for other people to find your post in the future when they have the same question. Thank you, and welcome to the Julia community - we are glad that you’re here!
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I’ll be blunt and say that I think this kinda sucks. This is a community formed channel and is very useful to a lot of people. I also agree with others that where this decision feels very top-heavy / business like. “We determined this was not in the best interest of the company so we shut it down”.
What happens when someone opens #helpdesk2? Does that channel also get deleted with a “no help allowed on slack” argument? Do you get banned if you open help channels? What about other more domain-specific “helpdesk” channels?
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Which is also why it makes no point to shut down slack #helpdesk because there will always exist other chat based channels for asking questions. Chat based hep channels are very useful and a community will organically create such channels so trying to shut them down is pointless and community hostile. Having to find a way to get access to a helpdesk channel that is “out of reach” from the community leaders to shut down seems backwards.
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I agree with @kristoffer.carlsson this decision feels odd. It is/was one of the great things from the Julia Slack and from the Julia community.
On the other hand, the solution feels even weirder. I know that my colleagues “stack overflow” their way through life … Why not focus on having curated/sanitized answers there? … instead of using yet one another medium/server
This is of course well intended, but there are also some reasonable doubts whether this is a decision in the right direction. It would certainly be valuable to get some public feedback before such type of decision and not only after.
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If helpdesk is completely moved to discourse, users who appreciate discourse for what it is now might feel that the site is no longer attractive because the interesting discussion topics drown in all the helpdesk posts.
This has to some extent already started to happen, and perhaps it is inevitable as the community grows, but closing down helpdesk will most definitely cause the noise to signal ratio on discourse to skyrocket. (Not that new users asking for help is “noisy”, but it’s definitely a different kind of content.)
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I in general feel that StackOverflow is under-used by the Julia community. The reason I think we should focus on it more is that newcomers to Julia are not likely to know about Discourse/Slack/Zulip but have a SO account (+ search engine friendly, + improving positioning of Julia in rankings).
For several years I have answered on SO as one of the few people who regularly did this to keep it alive (for my students SO was a first place to go and I wanted users to feel that SO has a quick response time for #julia tag).
Now the situation is much better fortunately with more people answering there and I feel that if we put more emphasis on SO (despite its downsides) even more people could get involved. This would have a side benefit of naturally reducing the #helpdesk burden of other communication channels.
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