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 this will probably backfire in the future :/
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 am a long time user of SE (questions and answers alike) and I go to reddit for questions which are more vague (because I do not know where to go) or the ones which invite discussions.
Type in my programming question, go to the page, scroll down and see a wide variety of idiomatic, well-researched and thoroughly critiqued solutions, very readable, ready to copy, and with the concepts spelled out to study up on.
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.
In any case the act of composing a question according to the guide has answered many more questions than I've actually posted -- some due to the rubber-ducking, others via the "check out these questions" feature.
(This is all orthogonal to the recent issues wrt moderators and community managers)
It may seem beginner hostile sometimes, but in practice it's mostly: you can't have a personal approach to everyone when looking through hundreds of messages.
I've actually wondered whether that feature (the Kanban style boards) will end up going away, as it seem vastly underused by the overall community in comparison to Issues/Milestones/Wikis.
Go to a random substantial repo and click on the Projects tab. It's almost certain that there'll be nothing there.
I don't like having my revenue generating activities linked to a social network for programmers. It seems like a terrible mix. I am not social at all. I know programming has now become a "social" thing as it is in the mainstream, but I prefer the days of it being an obscure world where you had to join some kind of mailing list.
https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/07/problems-with-pull-...
*Just found the answer: https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/
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.
At least for Patreon, they have a large enough user base, this won't hit them particularly hard.
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.
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.
I have given these models lots of thought and have come to the conclusion that the success/failure of hierarchical conversations is determined solely by the presentation. Common mailing lists and email UIs leave the most to be desired, while HN, reddit, sbnation community sites, etc show a path forward. But nobody has implemented the view properly enough to let you see the forest and the trees at the same time (yet).
Uhm... have you ever heard of a little-known site called "Hackernews"?
This means being able to expand and collapse the tree easily, as well as identify quickly nodes that have replies.
On a typical Usenet reader, new replies are normally highlighted, and read nodes/subthreads can be quickly collapsed, often by default.
Neither of those are possible with HN, Reddit or typical NodeBB sites where every post is displayed whether read or not.
4chan + 4chanx would like to have a word!
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 issues tracker minimal.
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.
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts
It's a matter of what the settings are on the group (the group admins get to decide visibility settings).
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.
(We also offer it to open source communities for free as well: https://aether.app/email)
The crucial problem with code review on GitHub is that it's 100% dependent on Git to store the history of a PR. This too closely couples what a developer does locally on their machine to the code review process. This in turn means that force pushing drops the history of their "Checks" system, which annotate the PR with CI job an lint/test results. It also means junk commits on PRs make the whole review process more difficult. The app Reviewable [2] works with GitHub and fixes some of these issues if you want to give it a try.
0 - https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1170804894241972224
When you've left a review, you also generally get a “View Changes” button in the conversation that takes you to the changes since you last viewed, if new changes are pushed. The issue with this particular link is it tends to be ephemeral.
And while not particularly ergonomic you can have PR against other PR since forever.
Github is built by devs for devs and has tons of hidden gems scattered in there. Do read their shortcuts help, blog and other dev sources and you might find tools for a lot of the task you can think of.
> force-pushed the aojea:affinity branch from 8eab3f7 to ee626e7 yesterday [0]
Where the "force pushed" links to a pretty decent UI [1], but it will include a bunch of non-import information if the person rebased and force pushed, which is a common reason for force pushing.
You can see that in this [2] long lived Kubernetes PR that was rebased, the resulting "helpful" link shows me 2094 changed files [3]. In a tool like Gerrit or Phabricator this is automatically handled and it would basically ignore this operation unless the rebase changed the code being reviewed.
0 - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/88409
1 - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/compare/8eab3f73163...
2 - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/85000
3 - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/compare/375873cb532...
If the issue is reviewing the code, stale reviews for code that was pushed over will be marked as stale.
I wonder what will be the reduction in stackoverflow due to this ?
One request - have a global "discussions search" . Repos are interconnected to each other. I don't want to have to restrict my topic search to one repository's discussions
Having a place to do this right next to the source code would be welcome (as long as there is global search as well)
E.g. https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/t...
Stack Overflow
Someone else from the community may have already asked a similar question or may be able to help with your problem. The Kubernetes team will also monitor posts tagged Kubernetes. If there aren’t any existing questions that help, please ask a new one!
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.
Friendly aside: the expression is "err(s) on the side of..."
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.
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.
How do we actually find out about GitHub Discussions and opting-into it? Or did GitHub only enrol one company into the beta?
> Some projects already do this via labels.
That was an illogical hack do to limitations. Good on Github for identifying and fixing that.
I've seen some teams manage an 'issues' repository solely with tickets that are later linked to the individual repos' issues and PRs. It's quite a mess and GH does not seem to offer issue statistics and comprehensive query capabilities to manage issues.
Has anyone worked with an issue management system (not JIRA) that would be working across 100+ delivery teams and have decent integration with GH/GHE to show PR progress, issue status, releases, etc.? Any experience with FB's https://phacility.com/phabricator/ for example?
My advise would be to deploy: Phabricator (issues, code review, wiki), Buildkite (CI - with your own AWS runners), gitolite (repo hosting).
https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g...
Maybe GitHub acquired Spectrum with the intention of slowly migrating its userbase over.
Compared to other community forums it's distinguishing feature will be referencing commits and issues. I'd be interested to see how many projects actually use this feature.
[0]: https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/
Curious to know if they feel they could iterate faster new features for the UI if it were an SPA.
Some companies start API first or mobile app first, which makes SPAs much more likely.
This seems like it'll be great for getting Q&A and random thoughts out of issues, but it won't replace broader boards and lists.
Hopefully this will reduce the issue spam problem.
I wasn't able to find GitHub page covering this feature, so the link to to Next.js's repo discussions.
That makes me question ( because they are Microsoft), What happens when they add everything inside Github and then they don't like it? Will they have an opportunity of closing Github? Switching it to something inside their office tool? May be office suite for developers? Combine Visual Studio with Github and discussion boards and todo lists and CI tools... ???
I'm the kind of developer/product maker who likes to use a diversity of products. That feeds my creativity and makes me think differently.. I don't want to lose that one.
Anyways...
I wanna ask something different, What do you think if StackOverFlow adds git hosting? Will it work?
(and not just a team integration please... :D)
