Dear GitHub

It's a huge tax on attention and contributions if a project decides not to use GitHub. There are many GitHub replacements but none of them have the community of GitHub.

Anyway, I found that http://feathub.com/ addressed my frustration about the absence of a voting system.

GitHub is fantastic because everyone is on it, but the issue system has not improved since inception - and I felt the UI changes have actually stepped back.

We had to implement our own bot to comment on tickets that did not appear to follow a template, and I would have given a kingdom for a template that let people filter their own tickets into whether they were bugs or feature requests or doc items.

We also had a repo of common replies we copy and pasted manually (this because there was so much traffic and me replying quickly would likely tick someone off - but this too could have been eliminated mostly with a good template system). Having this built-in (maybe I could have picked a web extension) would have also been helpful.

So many hours lost that could have been features or bugfixes - and by many, I mean totally weeks, if not cumulative months.

GitHub does the world a great service, and I love it, but this would help tons.

I always got a response when I filed a ticket - ALWAYS - but a lot of them were in the "we'll take that under consideration" type vein.

I feel opening GitHub RFEs up to votes is probably not the answer to serve the maintainer side of the equation, since users outnumber maintainers, but these needs to be done and would greatly improve OSS just based on expediting velocity.

If you don't use the GitHub tracker you lose out on a lot of useful tickets. However, if you use it, you are pretty much using the most unsophisticated tracker out there.

It's good because there's a low barrier to entry, but just having a template system - a very very very basic one, would do wonders.

A final idea is that GitHub really should have a mailing list or discussion system. Google Groups sucks for moderation, and I THINK you could probably make something awesome. Think about how Trac and the Wiki were integrated, for instance, and how you could automatically hyperlink between threads and tickets. The reason I say this is often GitHub creates a "throw code at project" methodology, which is bound to upset both contributor and maintainer - when often a "how should I do this" discussion first saves work. Yet joining a Google Group is a lot of commitment for people, and they probably don't want the email. Something to think about, perhaps.

Also think about StackOverflow. It's kind of a wasteland of questions, but if there was a users-helping-users type area, it would reduce tickets that were not really bugs, but really requests for help. These take time to triage, and "please instead ask over here and join this list" causes people pain.

I love all the work to keep up site reliability, maybe I'd appreciate more/better analytics, but I totally say this wearing a GitHub octocat shirt at the moment.