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Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#51

Post by fundamental »

mabynogy wrote: post #45
sanxiyn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see 19 contributors, which do look small.

19 is very good. Recruiting active contributors is extremely difficult.

Boy oh boy is that an understatement. One of the ~15 year old ~70kloc projects I help maintain only has a handful of active contributors at any point. Even with efforts put into marketing it there's not a large pool of people to pull from.

I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute to (in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process.

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#52

Post by gkya »

jwilk wrote: post #27
gkya wrote: post #15

Issues tagged as discussion would work, no? Many projects use the bug tracker for almost any discussion. If you would want sth. like a mailing list, there's http://librelist.com/ .

I briefly considered Librelist, but their UI is a disaster. To create or subscribe to list, you... send a message to the list. It's beyond me why would anyone want it like that. I ended up using https://groups.io/ for my pet project.

Disaster is too heavy of an adjective there. You may not like it. But interacting with mailing lists using mail is common practice, possible also with mailman and majordomo, and probably with most other mailing list software. You should also be a bit nicer when talking about an open source project hosted for free for everybody.

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#53

Post by gkya »

ljw1001 wrote: post #29
gkya wrote: post #15

Issues tagged as discussion would work, no? Many projects use the bug tracker for almost any discussion. If you would want sth. like a mailing list, there's http://librelist.com/ .

I think some people don’t feel like it’s appropriate for asking questions. Also, you end up with a ton of open issues if you want the topics to be easy to find

There is tagging for that. Though that may end up requiring some discipline to be really effective.

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#56

Post by mabynogy »

fundamental wrote: post #51
mabynogy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19 is very good. Recruiting active contributors is extremely difficult.

Boy oh boy is that an understatement. One of the ~15 year old ~70kloc projects I help maintain only has a handful of active contributors at any point. Even with efforts put into marketing it there's not a large pool of people to pull from. I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute to (in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process.

> I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute to (in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process.

I'm trying to elaborate something for that. On way I see is to reduce the entry level as much as possible.

I deduce that a project aiming a lot of contributors should be heterogeneous (contributors can choose their favorite language)and shouldn't have a single build system (interfaces exists at runtime with a middleware, vms, or files).

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#57

Post by erlend_sh »

avar wrote: post #39

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Google Groups, no it doesn't have any deep integration with GitHub, but plenty of very active projects hosted on GitHub and elsewhere use it, and it's a great free forum provider with an easy web UI for those that want it, and E-Mail for power-users. Keep in mind that most of the value people get out of such forums is being able to search possibly years old posts after the fact, and s…

The main thing I really dislike about Google Groups is that it doesn't provide any reasonable export option.

Disclaimer: I work for Discourse.

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#58

Post by imtringued »

mabynogy wrote: post #45
sanxiyn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see 19 contributors, which do look small.

19 is very good. Recruiting active contributors is extremely difficult.

Unfortunately in this case only 3 of them are active contributors.

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#59

Post by webbles »

Leo_Verto wrote: post #37
ljw1001 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might go with discourse but I can’t afford the saas version ($100/mo) and was hoping to avoid having another thing to maintain.

You should be eligible for the 50% non-profit discount and could maybe even get it for free as an open source project: https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-host... (you don't exactly meet the threshold criteria yet but look at the top comment on that post).

50 bucks a month what a joke.

Re: Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

#60

Post by fundamental »

mabynogy wrote: post #56
fundamental wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy oh boy is that an understatement. One of the ~15 year old ~70kloc projects I help maintain only has a handful of active contributors at any point. Even with efforts put into marketing it there's not a large pool of people to pull from. I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute to (in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process.

> I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute to (in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process. I'm trying to elaborate something for that. On way I see is to reduce the entry level as much as possible. I deduce that a project aiming a lot of contributors should be heterogeneous (contributors can choose their favorite language)and shouldn't have a single build system (int…

That might work or it could backfire. With more build systems and more languages, then you can easily end up in the category that someone needs to know all of them to make meaningful changes. If you have people staying in their own part of the codebase it's easy to imagine significant bitrot occurring over time.
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