Silly question I’m sure, but I lurk on slack#makie a lot and I see many repeated questions being asked there. Slack’s lack of history leads me to wonder if there isn’t any better way of solving this. While nice, clean, and complete PR to docs are great, maybe there’s an intermediate solution – one that is better than history-less slack but easier than doc PRs.
Just throwing a wild idea here: a bot/app that would allow a user to tag one or more slack-posts as the question, and one or more posts as the answer. Then the app would push these to some public searchable repository. It would take the person asking the question and/or the person/s answering a (minimum) total of 3 clicks (1. select question post/s, 2. select answer post/s, 3. submit; of course we could skip the categorization of what pertains a question/answer and just push everything packaged together) and boom we’ve beefed up “some docs”. Simon might never need to answer the same question twice again (of course this would work for many other contributors out there)!
Apart from the implementation, one problem will occur when old answers are not relevant any longer (due to changes/updates to the package). User could simply find a (outdated) solution in that repo, test it, see that it fails, ask on slack, tag new solution, and move on. Next user will have to follow the most recent match on their search (and maybe some maintainers could cull outdated contributions to this repo). Again, this is far from perfect, and it is relevant mostly to highly dynamic projects such as Makie, but if the implementation isn’t too difficult then seems like it’s better than today’s slack.
Ideally we would move away from slack to something with history, but this was discussed before.