I feel bad that connecting a discussion post with the correct developer is mostly done by @richard at least in the posts I’ve been tagged in. Would it be worth putting together a decision tree or something like that to lead people to whomever to tag that might answer their question? I know this might be fraught as the most active contributors might be inundated by tags but that was why I was thinking a decision tree might be helpful, which could be done on a signup basis (i.e. I happy to field questions about ieeg, mne-bids, current source density and 3d plotting functions so my name could be at the leaves of those branches). I think it would just be nice if no one person were the glue that held the discussion board together and the answers were as evenly dispersed across contributors as possible.
In fact, you can subscribe to any tags you like to receive (email) notifications when new postings with these tags show up if you visit
https://mne.discourse.group/u/YOUR_USE_NAME/preferences/tags
e.g. for you this would be:
This, of course, requires postings be tagged correctly. I scroll over the various posts almost every day and add / clean up tags.
We can also add tags automatically based on keywords. Currently, I’ve only configured it to add an evoked tag if the term ERP occurs in the posting:
https://mne.discourse.group/admin/customize/watched_words/action/tag
FWIW, I don’t mind the work so far, but of course, distributing the work more reduced the bus factor and makes things more robust in general 
And of course all of our users are welcome to help, too!!
Okay, sounds like that’s not your vision of the discussion board functionality but that’s okay! My perspective is that having a guide for users may help for a more personalized call for help that is more motivating for me to answer an issue personally and shows that someone has put in a bit of effort to learn not just about the software but also who to ask. IMO listservs can get pretty impersonal quickly which makes it difficult to maintain buy-in. When I see that Richard has tagged me on an issue, that really makes me want to solve the problem because I know you’re a real person and a nice guy. If there is a way to increase how much users can learn who has expertise on what code, it might help for better engagement. Just my opinion though.
@alexrockhill Thanks for sharing your thoughts!! I’m totally open to keep discussing this! (Therefore, I’ve also unmarked this conversation as “resolved”). I suggest we bring this up during the next developers’ meeting this Friday, WDYT? It will take place at 4:00 PM UTC. Do you think you could join?
also tagging: @rob-luke @drammock @cbrnr @wmvanvliet @agramfort @adam2392 @britta-wstnr @larsoner @sappelhoff @GuillaumeFavelier
This is something that @larsoner and I discussed a couple weeks ago, actually. Happy to talk more about it at next meeting.
I assume y’all are referring to conversations in this forum? GitHub automatically suggests (more or less) suitable reviewers based on who recently modified related code segments, but of course this is not possible in the forum.
Yeah that would be ideal, the question is whether it would be nice to have users be able to look up and engage with directly whomever developed the part of the code that they are using (or at least tag them to ask if they are available) instead of relying on someone to be the go-between or whether that’s too much tagging/it would be better that if you’re interested in a topic you should subscribe to it.