#General and Off-Topic Chat Resolutions

[StrangeWill]

So issues with people running off-topic in #general has gotten pretty bad as of late, we have multiple people being reminded often about this, with the "take it to #[channel]" being buried in the noise going on.

First of all:

General is for "on-topic" subjects about Devanooga, it's General Devanooga Talk, not "general anything goes", that is what #random is for.

Remember: there are 200+ people in #general that cannot leave the channel. Also it's the first thing new member see.

So we have discussed some solutions in the past:

• Change #general to #announcements, lock everyone but staff out, create a #general chat. Adjust defaults accordingly.
• Spend some time with Devanoobot and create tools for doing better moderation (eg: channel mutes, channel cleanup, etc.) hand out softer punishments.
• Temporary bans.
• Temporary locking of #general

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My feelings: I'm maybe leaning more towards tooling with Devanoobot and trying to keep general open. Barring that, changing #general to #announcements.

Any other ideas?

I'm aiming to have a resolution to this by next week.

[DigTK]

I think the easiest and maybe best solution right now is to change the #general channel to something else like #announcements or #introductions or something and then just have new members autojoin the #general and #random channels that they can actually leave if they want to. Maybe even have them automatically join some other channels, like #events. Or have devanoobot send them a private message with channel suggestions when they join the Slack.

[samlachance]

I think we should change it to #introductions

[samlachance]

actually I changed my mind, #announcements is better

[DigTK]

Actually, after thinking it over a bit more, I think we should not have people autojoin any channels at all (other than the locked down #announcements since that's unavoidable). Even without a message from devanoobot telling them about curated channels they'd now probably go to the Channels list themselves once they realize they can't post in #announcements

[StrangeWill]

So far the discussions outside of GitHub about this:

• @agarzola - Not a fan of moving straight to locking down the default channel and making it announcements only, recreating #general elsewhere will just be off topic too.
• @StrangeWill - Anything we try is not set in stone -- we can experiment a little, try something, try something else, I'm not afraid of applying a few rapid changes.
• @StrangeWill - I'm not a total fan of locking down #general, making the default channel centered around staff introduces the community to us staff, not the community as a whole. I still want to put community first in people's experiences.
• @StrangeWill - I'm a fan of making #introductions a thing as part of this though. See Adding New Default Channels #43
• @StrangeWill - Ultimately Devanooga is not a democracy, we'd like to keep our main goals in mind (the community at large and how we present ourselves), while changing #general to #announcements had a pretty decent backing, I'm inclined to a softer solution (see below).
• @samlachance - If we just jump directly to locking down #general the problem is solved, no need to over-complicate things.

(feel free to correct me if I've misinterpreted your feelings in this summary above)

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Proposed Solution's Goals:

Ultimately the goal of Devanooga is to promote a healthy online community, so the goals are simple:

• Community first.
• Staff are here to facilitate having a healthy community, we want the community in the forefront.
• A new user being dropped in should see what kind of on-topic discussions we like to have surrounding IT or talk about our community, get the hyped to get involved.

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Phase 1

There was a lot of arguments that #general should just be "whatever" chat because it's just "general", the name doesn't really convey what kind of talk should go on.

• Rename #general to #devanooga-chat -- on-topic talks about tech or meta discussions about Devanooga.
• Rename #random to #general, it's how we use it anyway.

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Phase 2

Moderation tools are weak, doesn't allow us to do much other than threaten people with temporary bans. Sometimes when people are asked to take chats elsewhere they refuse to (when asked by other members or by staff), staff needs tooling that isn't just banning people.

There is some complaints that topics can lose their steam or organically flow away from an on-topic discussion, so having a way to forklift discussions into the right channel may help.

Just as point though: today's situation was never on topic.

• Introduce tooling for Devanoobot that allows:
  • Muting of individuals for a time period, during this period they cannot post in a channel.
  • Moving of messages, basically "move all messages from 2pm to now" to move messages between channels to move a conversation.
• Start being able to moderate with more than temp/permanent bans from the community only, enforce rules tighter.

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Scorched earth, no other "nice" solutions have worked.

Phase 3

• Rename devanooga-chat to #announcements, make it staff-only.

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Opinions? Ideas? More phase suggestions?

[StrangeWill]

Executed phase 1, had complaints about changing #random to #general, so kept it #random for now, will move to #general in a phase 1.5 if we have to do more.