31–40 of 141 posts
Definitely a welcome addition, but it's funny that after all this time the solution was just to copy-paste the Issues tab and rename it. In fact in our public repos we have a "Discussion" label for such issues and it has worked pretty well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…
SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer.
That isn't to say discussion isn't useful or valuable, it absolutely is, it is just a completely different thing. This is competing with Discourse, not SO.
I like how quickly GitHub is shipping new features now, compared to earlier: the mobile app, Actions, Sponsors, security scanning, etc.
That said, I was a little disappointed that Discussions is essentially identical to Issues :(.
While I can't pinpoint any specific issues I've had with Issues for discussions, I was hoping GitHub found, and found solutions for, pain points that users didn't know they had with Issues.
Superb. Many open source projects still bounce you to Google Groups for discussion, which is archaic at this point. Even requires Google login just to read threads. Also it's often unclear what the policy is on raising questions in the issues tracker (smaller projects are usually fine with it, bigger projects get overwhelmed and don't want it). This will make it a much nicer separation for everyone and keep the issue…
Proprietary project management tools - slack, github issues, PRs, discussions, etc are terrible places to host OSS communications. Use open source tools.
It seems to me the real thing open source projects ought to have is control over their data / autonomy - having some service control your forums and publish the code they use to run them doesn't seem like much of an advantage, if you can't apply patches to their system. For instance, while it helps Debian that their GitLab instance salsa.debian.org is open source, how does it help a non-Debian-affiliated project that happens to use that service?
So there are two separate things you could be interested in. One is, am I running my own service? Most people don't want to be 24/7 volunteer sysadmins, it turns out. (A few do, like the people who run salsa.debian.org: more power to them. A few open source projects can pay sysadmins, which also solves the problem.)
The other question is, can I get my project's data out of someone else's service if I want to migrate? It turns out that you can do that for many closed-source forums.
GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…
Congrats on shipping! I like how quickly GitHub is shipping new features now, compared to earlier: the mobile app, Actions, Sponsors, security scanning, etc. That said, I was a little disappointed that Discussions is essentially identical to Issues :(. While I can't pinpoint any specific issues I've had with Issues for discussions, I was hoping GitHub found, and found solutions for, pain points that users didn't know…
GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But t…
I don't want to make the same comment repeatedly, but anyone saying this aims at SO is fundamentally misunderstanding why SO is successful and what it offers. SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer. That isn't to say di…
They just need to create an integrated gitter clone now, or maybe buy it from gitlab. Also this step pretty much kills discourse, doesn't it?
https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g...
But I would caution against integrating too many tools into GitHub. As a user, I like that GitHub errors on the side of saying no. You don't want to end up with a bloated product.
Congrats on shipping! I like how quickly GitHub is shipping new features now, compared to earlier: the mobile app, Actions, Sponsors, security scanning, etc. That said, I was a little disappointed that Discussions is essentially identical to Issues :(. While I can't pinpoint any specific issues I've had with Issues for discussions, I was hoping GitHub found, and found solutions for, pain points that users didn't know…
It's a little different. You can mark which comment answers a question, and comments can be voted. We will probably find some other things we want Discussions to do differently, too, as we iterate.
Reading this HN thread, I got the impression GitHub actually did just copy/paste Issues into a new tab, as a commenter mentioned, a belief that was backed up by a cursory look at Next.js's Discussions.
Now I see that's not fully the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to make the same comment repeatedly, but anyone saying this aims at SO is fundamentally misunderstanding why SO is successful and what it offers. SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer. That isn't to say di…
It still competes with SO because now you'd post the question about a certain framework or library on its repo's discussions. Also, isn't it kind of explicitly doing that because discussions can elect an "accepted" answer?
Accepting an answer is an attempt, but without the moderation, editing, voting, duplicate closing and so on from SO, the quality and ease of finding answers won't be there.
I'm sure plenty of people remember trying to find answers through forums, and it was a nightmare. The thread might not actually have an answer in it, and even if you get pointed to an answer, it'll often need context from the rest of the thread, it might be out of date, or completely wrong.
To put it simply: there is a reason why people use SO almost exclusively for Q&A, and there is a reason people still use forums and stuff as well. Discussion and Q&A have different goals and conflating or combining them leads to pain for users.