My concern is it might make us weaker in our efforts to purge migrate away from Yammer in Mozilla. If ‘offtopic’ content can’t be posted here, it might make people more inclined to just post everything on Yammer, including stuff which should be public (or private with the easy possibly of making it public, at a later date), and nothing here.
@r_oVhPfcJCUUC5wbm6i4_C2Q was describing this sort-of problem about a year ago, and I doubt it’s gotten any better:
Even then, I think there’s a reasonable argument for water-cooler chat being public, and easily accessible to new contributors, to (hopefully) create a welcoming environment.
I can see this being the case with some topics (politics, for instance) but not so much with others. I’d like to think we can trust Mozillians to be sensible enough to mostly stay away from topics which would prove very divisive.
I suppose we should try to imagine what an offtopic category would contain topics on. I can’t really think of it containing topics on anything but semi-Mozilla-related themes, but which aren’t related to project planning. Discussions about the latest version of Android, or what OS people run on their computer, for instance. But that might just be me.