Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Discussions Beta

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 141 posts

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#71

Post by CGamesPlay »

mmahemoff wrote: post #5

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…

> Even requires Google login just to read threads.

Fun fact: if your session is "expired" but the cookie says you have an account, it forces you to log in, even if the group is public. Workaround: incognito mode.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#72

Post by hombre_fatal »

kitd wrote: post #60

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

Tree-view doesn't exist once there's a global reply box. A `comment.parent` pointer only makes sense on a website like Reddit where the user is forced to reply to someone.

Else you have a situation like most forums (phpbb, vbulletin, xenforo, etc) where tree-view is useless and unused because only a fraction of the posts have any sort of parent relationship. Besides, the idea of tree-view never really caught on in those fuller-fledged forums I listed as you could be quoting any number of people and have more than a 1:1 argument like you're forced to on Reddit/HN.

In other words, I don't think a forum lacks a tree-view when it's also lacking the entire reply paradigm.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#73

Post by hombre_fatal »

treve wrote: post #35
kvark wrote: post #18

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 can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

Stack Overflow has only become more popular since I used it.

I used to answer people's questions. These days I'll go to a section like Node.js and frankly anyone who asked a good, focused question has been answered and you're left sifting through the low-tier questions of people posting an unformatted 1000-line code snippet with "it doesn't work".

Seems to be working pretty well.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#74

Post by jansan »

stingraycharles wrote: post #56
yowmamasita wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’ll be very interesting to see how Google ranks the search results. I don’t know about others, but I almost never directly search SO, and almost always end up there through Google. If GitHub Discussions has the answer and Google directs me there, I will definitely not visit SO as often anymore.

Stackoverflow's search algorithm sucks compared to Google. I always use google and add the "site:stackoverflow.com" operator to find answers on SO.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#75

Post by rossmohax »

samatman wrote: post #65
balladeer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering whether Github issues (and now discussions) are exportable? *Just found the answer: https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/

I find it maddening that git hasn't added a standard mechanism for metadata. Commit comments are metadata. Tags are metadata. Why isn't there a general-purpose metadata plumbing so we can attach issues, merge and commit discussions, and wikis, in a portable way? No, being able to export from one centralized repository and import into another isn't good enough.

You can attach as much metadata as you want using git-note.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#76

Post by dewey »

geofft wrote: post #34
jacobsenscott wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary project management tools - slack, github issues, PRs, discussions, etc are terrible places to host OSS communications. Use open source tools.

Why? 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…

Having your OSS discussions on Slack is pretty terrible, it’s a closed source silo where things can’t be found via Google or even with the included search if you are above the limit. Every time I see an open source project asking people to “Join our Slack” it makes me sad.

Besides, I’m in too many Slacks already. I really don’t need one Slack account for each project I want to follow.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#77

Post by saagarjha »

rolleiflex wrote: post #61
saagarjha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing nice about Google Groups is that you can largely use it to its fullest extent from email.

Yup, use through email is huge, especially when combined with not having to create an account — just join the mailing list. I do have some personal experience with this: when we added the backwards compatibility to email to our team discussion tool (Aether Pro), the usage shot through the roof. To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better, 21st century version of Google Groups. (We also offer it to open…

> To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better

Hmm, I'm not completely convinced it would (but I haven't used it, so take this opinion with a grain of salt). Responding to rich text emails is somewhat cumbersome in most mail apps, because there's a tendency for formatting to get all mixed up and it makes simple things like quoting nontrivial.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#78

Post by animalnewbie »

kitd wrote: post #60

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

> every discussion forum since Usenet

4chan + 4chanx would like to have a word!

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#79

Post by animalnewbie »

treve wrote: post #35
kvark wrote: post #18

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 can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

Quite the contrary experience, it's specially hostile to knowledgeable people. My last 3-4 questions were all closed because I wrote targeting experts and the mods had trouble understanding what I was asking.

Re: GitHub Discussions Beta

#80

Post by lqs469 »

Github is becoming more and more diverse. the style of Github has always been a professional discussion about issues or features. But now it may be changing, Maybe because users are becoming more and more willing to use it as a forum to discuss something it's maybe not that useful on it. Now Github has opened up an area to do this, which may be a good thing while maintaining professionalism and making the community is more like a community.
Post reply on HN