Discussion: zulip stream naming convention causing 'understanding friction'

[Ben]

Zulip is new to me, and my first experience included having to parse the 't-' prefix in the stream names. . This is the first time coming across 't-', and it left me with a minor sense of 'I'm an outsider here', which I believe is considered an undesirable outcome by the rust community . The biggest contributor to this, in my experience was this:

using ctrl-f t- to find explanations is problematic due to 't-$name' clashing with 'rust-$foo'

thus, when searching for the answer to "what is this t- prefix?" in the rust-forge book, results were polluted, obfuscating the section that explains it.

My take on why it caused a "sense of outsider":

• It seems to be an important part of how this zulip channel is organized
• I have not come across it anywhere else.
• Due to above mentioned clashing of 't-$team_name' and 'rust-$topic', a feeling that this was an 'insider-knowledge' started generating

Proposed solution: change the 't-' prefix to 'tm-', ideally such that there is little friction when reverting back to 't-' if desired.

Reasoning:

• searching for 'tm-' will no longer clash in zulip-use documentation (at time of writing). Possibly in other important locations also.
• 'tm' is a stronger hint than 't', giving a reduced sense of obfuscation of meaning
• as zulip newcomers become more prominent in the user-base, not knowing 't-' becomes less exclusionary. At that point, reverting back to 't-' might be desired.

Caveats:
It might be worth considering adding a note to the zulip documentation the reasoning for 'tm-' over 't-'.

[Ben]

I would like to add: I really like there being a 2-char team-name prefix. Makes things MUCH clearer when you realize what it is. I would see 'tm-' as a more temporary thing during the community uptake period, where the broader community is still becoming familiar with it.

[XAMPPRocky]

Thank you for your issue! I think whether it should t- or tm- would be better discussed on Zulip in the #zulip channel. Since it's more likely that the right people will see it.

Personally I lean to keeping t- if only for historical reasons. Regardless I think we can try to address some of what you mentioned by having a section that explains the naming scheme.

Generally I think we'd be well served with a "jargon" page, filled with terms and shorthands like this.

[Ben]

I was originally going to post in zulip, but started feeling like a formal submission of an issue. I'll Copy-paste with a link to this issue shortly, and comment there.

[Ben]

link to Zulip discussion

[Eduard-Mihai Burtescu]

t- is a weird spelling of T- IMO, which is the label prefix we use in rust-lang/rust.

But also, it's an unnecessary prefix, compiler and compiler/... look fine to me.
For comparison, one Discord there's #compiler, which also works fine.

[XAMPPRocky]

I don't think we should be removing the prefixes because for certain teams it makes the room's topic ambiguous and more prone to spam or offtopic discussion. E.g. #community is not obvious that it's for the community team and not the community. We've been adding -team to a few of the channels on the discord to address this exact issue.

[XAMPPRocky]

I'm going to close as it's offtopic for the forge.