What is a place to hang-out & discuss the project

[Anton-Latukha]

I want to make some fixes to HLS and use that as an introduction into from time to time doing work on HLS.

As a maintainer I know how is it to do quality work on a pretty complex project. And how much time goes into learning ins and outs of it.
I can spend evenings (really much more) learning the project, before I would know proper places to fix abstract representations.

Or I can just ask maintainers/people for directions - to point to module/s should be enough for me.

But this is not about me or my things, used it just as an example prelude.

On the project, main page, In "Contributing" or "Troubleshooting" or in ReadTheDocs TOC seems to be no indication of any chat room where people can hang-out, and ask such questions as mine to help one another.

Where to go to get some basic help while wanting to work on the project?

[jneira]

Hi, happy to see new contributors, we have some links about here: https://haskell-language-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/contributing.html#contributing-guidelines
Maybe they shouls be more visible in indices?

Join our IRC channel at #haskell-language-server on libera.
Follow the Haskell IDE team twitter account for updates and help.
Join the #haskell-tooling channel in the Functional Programming discord server. You can join the server via this invitation.

You also can be in touch with some hls maintainers in matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#haskell-tooling:matrix.org
The platform where most maintainers are present at this moment is irc

[Anton-Latukha]

Well, as I said. Just was puzzled not seeing the contact information.
I consider it is in the relatively proper place, but it is currently at least 1 step too far into the structure.

People are currently generally accustomed to search contact information on the project frontpage.
For example in HNix it is in the badge (for badge lovers, because I got users looking for contact info in badges), and in the #Contributing section. People (meaning I) also look at the top and the bottom of the frontpage. And then in GitHub frontpage situation people frequently just ctrl+f search for it over the information. But use search engine to search over the whole ReadTheDocs book to find contacts - is quite too much.

The think with HLS, the current contributor/user flow is:

1. Search on the front page. Get nothing.
2. Guess right that it may be in Contribution, but going there returns again - nothing.
3. Be persistent enough to think about starting reading the whole thing and maybe somewhere there would be information, so opening "Contributing guidelines" and suddenly to the name of the article - find contact info there.

Maybe put the contact info inside the "Contribution" section, or create subsection "Getting help/contact" there, if you want to be on a very safe side - add an ask to understand the "Contribution guidelines" before asking help or questions in the chat.

[Anton-Latukha]

Also want to note a good maintainer experience from you, thank you.

[jneira]

thanks for suggestions, add a badge is a good idea and I think the readme could have a second level index, where the link to contact section could be shown