RESURGENCE

A General Room Review Meeting for R Public chatroom

On the 3rd of April, at UTC 18:00, We're going to have ~~a fun party~~ an event at the R Public Chatroom and will last for about 15 minutes.

Be there or Be Square

Background

The room was frozen on 26th of February, 2016, due to lack of activity. After a few days, on 6th March, 2016, the room was un-frozen by Jon Clements, a Stack Overflow moderator. This small meeting is to mark the completion of four complete weeks after the re-opening of the room and to look back at these 28 days.

Agenda

Did the room have any significant activity in the past 4 weeks?
What steps/measures has to be taken to improve the room for both the visitors and users?

Feel free to ping any of the room regulars to add your topic for discussion.

The event concluded successfully with 6 participants. Do go through the meeting transcript below. The conversation is bookmarked for future reference.

The outcome of the room meeting can be enlisted as follows,

Did the room have any significant activity in the past 4 weeks?

– The answer was a resounding Yes. The room information page did show some solid proof of activity for the past 4 weeks.
What steps/measures has to be taken to improve the room for both the visitors and users?

– A few steps were debated upon and the following points were concluded.
- Improve the roomutils library to add more features.
- Utilize well constructed comments and bring the room to the attention of a few interested users who have asked off-topic questions on the main site. There would be a review meeting after a few months to take note of the then situation and assess the impact of this measure.

Transcript of the meeting

6:00 PM

RESURGENCE

Hiya o/

Meeting agenda is available here r-public.github.io/events/resurgence

We discuss the first issue for 5 mins and the 2nd for 10.

Starting with the first, 1. Did the room have any significant activity in the past 4 weeks?

Yes/No and why?

you were paying more attn than the rest of us, what is your take?

I'd say yes, we did have a few new users

A few old guys did turn in and said, OMG, the room's back

Would agree with that assessment -- seemed like higher volume than before, but still not a huge volume

6:03 PM

and you and Roman were here regularly

judging by activity stats chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/info/25312/r-public

From somewhere around 5 per day to 100 per day is significant activity

Hence can we conclude that the room did see some activity?

sure

Rajaprabhu Aravindasamy

Hi @BhargavRao

Hello @Rajaprabhu, event has started :-)

Moving on to the second topic, 2. What steps/measures has to be taken to improve the room for both the visitors and users?

github.com/r-public/room_utils is moving in a good direction

Sup, gang.

6:08 PM

o/

Well, I think one use for the room could be providing help on questions that are not on-topic for the main site.

Hello, @Roman;

@BhargavRao Of course it did, you were very active here. :)

@alistaire and @AHandcartAndMohair have planned to add more stuff for room_utils. I've planned to write a code to scrape tumbleweeds and get R questions from that.

To be an effective room for that, we would probably need more volume of question askers

6:10 PM

@josliber Yep, agree with that.

@josliber That's one way of going about it. Or we could just answer off-topic questions. This is what other tags often do (and was the norm for the r tag in the "old days").

@RomanLuštrik Right, I suppose many off-topic questions get answered in the comments if not in the answer section

As we had earlier discussed we need to draw the attention of those users on the main site who ask off-topic questions

This of course has ups and downs. Inadvertent clash between what we think and what other users with closing power think.

I would be supportive of this measure, if we left only well researched off-topic questions be.

True, that. We can still get the OPs of such posts here and discuss more about it.

6:12 PM

It's usually the case that off-topic questions are often also very poorly written, for whatever reasons. Sometimes very legitimate.

@RomanLuštrik What do you think as a counter-measure?

Right, we could "auto-respond" by inviting the user to this room and see how this goes. Evaluation of the measure would be done a few months down the line and see how things stand?

sounds reasonable to me

Yep, that'd be better

We'll have a room meet again after 2 months or so just to evaluate this. Agree?

sgtm

6:14 PM

Also, you could add into the tag wiki a link to this chat room. It may not help much but it doesn't do any harm and might invite askers in here, or make it more official.

@Tunaki It's already there stackoverflow.com/tags/r/info ... Somewhere at the end of the page

That was one reason why, we had to resurrect this room

@josliber Any other better ideas? :/

"sgtm" means "sounds good to me"

So I agree :)

Awesome, So any other clarifs?

Direct traffic here, meeting in a few months to discuss how the room is going

Yep. That's what we plan to do

Fine, then 5 mins after the end, we finally close it

Resurgence concludes, Thanks everyone for participating