[wp-hackers] Future of wp-hackers

[Austin Matzko]

On 9/25/07, Matt Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:
> Perhaps a new mailing list with moderated membership, or that was only
> open to those who had made substantive contributions to the codebase
> would be a good middle ground between private discussions, IRC, and
> wp-hackers.

I think a better long-term approach would be to reinforce a culture on
wp-hackers such that "serious discussion that determines the future
direction of the WordPress codebase takes place here," as is its
stated purpose. [1]

One way to do that is to use the "stick": repeatedly ask flame-wars,
off-topic stuff, etc., to go elsewhere.

But another--at least as important--is the "carrot": bring the serious
discussion here.  This is part of the problem:

> two months which had heightened activity on wp-hackers
> had the lowest participation from any core developers, including myself.

I realized a while ago that many of the most important discussions
about the future of WP were happening elsewhere, because fairly
important changes would show up in trac without any prior wp-hackers
discussion (with the major exception of the new terms taxonomy).  I
could be wrong, but I don't believe there was any hackers discussion
about jQuery, PHPMailer, and canonical url redirection, for example,
prior to their appearing in trac.  And a few weeks ago, I learned from
an aside somewhere on trac that Happy Cog is redesigning the admin.
That seems like something that should have made an appearance on this
list.

So the list is what we make of it.  Take the important stuff away, and
you leave a vacuum to be filled with all the other junk.

[1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists