Chatbot kills community forum

[amotl]

Problem

It looks like the chatbot conversation widget added the other day first led to a significant decline and then a complete dry-out of the community forum: There have been just three activities in September, down to zero in October and November 2025.

[amotl]

[...] down to zero in October and November 2025.

Is there a correlation to the download numbers of traditional Python client packages, because people are getting lost in chatbot conversations, so they no longer bother to even try some code?

We are observing a sharp decline followed by a trend on lower usage levels than before starting at the beginning of October 2025, for both crate-python and sqlalchemy-cratedb.

[amotl]

We heard rumors that sales interactions are also declining, so let's stop this operation (5773cea). It's always good to collect more evidence (can we have detailed numbers, and/or a graph?), but on the other hand, we think it's enough evidence already that the outcome can be considered detrimental?

[amotl]

Just a little landscape perspective.

Those database and software vendors don't provide an intrusive but anonymous "Ask AI" chat bot interface on their docs yet.

• https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs
• https://docs.couchdb.org/
• https://docs.databricks.com/
• https://duckdb.org/docs/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
• https://www.elastic.co/docs/
• https://docs.influxdata.com/
• https://docs.langchain.com/
• https://learn.microsoft.com/
• https://motherduck.com/docs/
• https://docs.oracle.com/
• https://docs.snowflake.com/
• https://docs.teradata.com/

Those vendors do.

• https://clickhouse.com/docs (slack)
• https://docs.arango.ai/ (google groups)
• https://grafana.com/grot/ (forum, slack)
• https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/ (forum, slack)

[kneth]

@amotl

let's stop this operation

This is not a company-wide decision, and I will strongly ask you to revert 633c000...43e4d95 until such a decision is made

[amotl]

Hi Kenneth. It has a tradition that overlays are put on the documentation without any kinds of discussions or decisions. As a consequence, we are removing them, and that's a very normal operation. In this spirit, the commit is just an update to previous variants of the same kind.