Last modified: 2013-10-02 18:43:54 UTC
They're not logged and the majority of the community doesn't know they exist.
What are "other useless channels", and if logging is the argument, why is this not a request to set up logging for them?
This is a request for people to stop creating a new channel every time 5 people want to hang out. It's annoying.
Creating new channels for that is fine; it's the new 'official' channels that get out of hand. If you've just got a small group of people who want a place to hang out for a specific thing away from others, that's what ## channels are for; folks should be using those. Reference: http://freenode.net/policy.shtml#channelnaming
Having been a member of a three-person team (Parsoid) with a dedicated IRC channel, I can say it was absolutely essential. If we'd only had the public -dev or #mediawiki channels, we would have either flooded them or talked less, and we would have been less able to interface with other teams in a controlled environment and the community in a dedicated place where they'd be sure to get help. All "official" channels should be listed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Channels - if the community wants to find new channels, or the channel to ask a particular question in, they can look there. But my understanding is that a lot of these channels are for intra-team communication, and it should really be up to each team to decide the utility of that.
While I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't see how to fix a "social problem" / mindset via a bug report in Bugzilla...
