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An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Trello provides a decent example of how to do it well [1], but GitHub feels like a black box. I'v

An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Trello provides a decent example of how to do it well [1], but GitHub feels like a black box. I've been on GitHub since 2008 and I have been paying every month for years, but other than emailing support I have no idea how to vote for a feature request. My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'. There are a lot of other people with the same frustration [2], but we have no idea how to get that on GitHub's roadmap. [1] http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-requests-for-trello http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-reques... [2] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144

jbergstroem 11y ago
I've had pretty good success with feature requests in Github – but I agree that it at least _feels_ like it depends on who is replying to you (or even what state of mind they're in; copy paste responses has been had). Anyway, a good example of a successful feature request – shared since it might help others in their quest for success – included me attempting to reduce the problem, scoping it and suggesting a solution. If you can find examples of this problem over multiple open source repositories (in my case nodejs) it seems to contribute to it getting fixed.
grey-area 11y ago
An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Perhaps if Github used their own issues system to gather feedback on Github itself, they'd more rapidly improve it. I'm sure they'd feel a lot of these pain points in a far sharper, more visceral way if they were subjected to them daily.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Yes it is fairly bizarre that Github don't dogfood the issues function. I'm sure they have an internal system that they prefer, but even that internal system could have a public interface. Also, if the internal system is superior then its superior features could be added to the public system so that we could all benefit.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Where are you getting that they don't dogfood the issue tracker? It's a private tracker (private repository) but from what I've seen in the Github blog, they do... it wouldn't make much sense if they didn't.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      If they're using it, they're doing so in completely different fashion than everyone else. That is, it's not public for viewing, submitting, commenting, etc. Indeed TFA indicates exactly the sorts of pain points that would be missed by those using the tool in such a radically different way than everyone else. If someone at GH had to wade through all the damn +1's then something would have been done about them years ago.
      - joelhooks 11y ago
        95% of all my github activity is in private repositories.
        Splendor 11y ago
        Do you feel like your usage is typical?
        jeddawson 11y ago
        Ditto. Maybe 98%. I think that's a big part of the disconnect I'm seeing here in the comments. Those of us that live in private repos are likely pretty happy with how things currently work especially since we're the ones paying to use the service. If it wasn't working well for our teams, we'd find somewhere else to spend our money. That being said, we're certainly the minority when it comes to users on the platform.
        cookiecaper 11y ago
        >That being said, we're certainly the minority when it comes to users on the platform. But you're the huge majority of people who give GitHub money. It makes sense not to prioritize the pain points of open-source projects when you lose money by hosting them.
- foota 11y ago
  But then they'd be spammed with useless +1 comments
  - donretag 11y ago
    +1
    - Rovanion 11y ago
      If one implemented issue voting then a +1 comment could automatically be converted into a vote.
      - DouweM 11y ago
        Which is almost exactly what happens on GitLab: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/687930087057027073 https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/687930087057027073 Users can use those buttons to +1 or -1, and any comments that contain nothing but an emoji (like `:+1:`) are automatically converted to emoji awards, as we call them.
peterfpf 11y ago
I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README. This normally doesn't go unnoticed. Another good example is harthur's "[UNMAINTAINED]" [1] [1] https://github.com/harthur/brain https://github.com/harthur/brain
- simoncion 11y ago
  > I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README. Aye. Some folks in the discussion linked to by krschultz complain that "People sometimes don't read the README and -thus- don't notice deprecation warnings.". To them I ask: "What makes you think that those sorts of people will notice anything less than an overlay that prevents them from interacting with the Github UI for that particular repo?".
  - clinta 11y ago
    One concern would be around tools that fetch from github automatically. go get for example would need some sort of structured metadata if it wanted to surface an error to a user that a library is deprecated.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > One concern would be around tools that fetch from github automatically. Sure. But... like... git doesn't know anything about deprecated repos. AFAIK, that's not a feature of git's repo fetch machinery. Anything Github would do to address this would have to modify the contents of the repo, right? > ...go get for example would need some sort of structured metadata [to do reasonable repo deprecation warnings] I mean, the JavaScript development community has -collectively- decided on a huge bundle of ad-hoc standards. I bet that it would be trivial for the signatories of the open letter to decide on a tagging mechanism to use in their README files to indicate repo deprecation. Do you disagree?
      - newjersey 11y ago
        I am not your grand parent poster but I fully agree with you and I'd go further than that. The people who ask for more proprietary features (or should I say anti-features) in Github are encouraging lock-in inside of Github. Github ought to be a hub. I'd like to emphasize on the hub part as it should be one hub out of many. It should not be the center of the software universe any more than AT&T/IBM/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Uber.
TheCoreh 11y ago
> My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'. What I came up to work around this is: - Create an org named <YOUR-USERNAME>-deprecated - Move the projects to the organization - Set the avatar of the organization to your avatar, with desaturated colors (purely cosmetic, optional) https://github.com/coreh-deprecated https://github.com/coreh-deprecated

jbergstroem 11y ago

I've had pretty good success with feature requests in Github – but I agree that it at least _feels_ like it depends on who is replying to you (or even what state of mind they're in; copy paste responses has been had). Anyway, a good example of a successful feature request – shared since it might help others in their quest for success – included me attempting to reduce the problem, scoping it and suggesting a solution. If you can find examples of this problem over multiple open source repositories (in my case nodejs) it seems to contribute to it getting fixed.

grey-area 11y ago

An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Perhaps if Github used their own issues system to gather feedback on Github itself, they'd more rapidly improve it. I'm sure they'd feel a lot of these pain points in a far sharper, more visceral way if they were subjected to them daily.

jessaustin 11y ago
Yes it is fairly bizarre that Github don't dogfood the issues function. I'm sure they have an internal system that they prefer, but even that internal system could have a public interface. Also, if the internal system is superior then its superior features could be added to the public system so that we could all benefit.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Where are you getting that they don't dogfood the issue tracker? It's a private tracker (private repository) but from what I've seen in the Github blog, they do... it wouldn't make much sense if they didn't.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    If they're using it, they're doing so in completely different fashion than everyone else. That is, it's not public for viewing, submitting, commenting, etc. Indeed TFA indicates exactly the sorts of pain points that would be missed by those using the tool in such a radically different way than everyone else. If someone at GH had to wade through all the damn +1's then something would have been done about them years ago.
    - joelhooks 11y ago
      95% of all my github activity is in private repositories.
      - Splendor 11y ago
        Do you feel like your usage is typical?
      - jeddawson 11y ago
        Ditto. Maybe 98%. I think that's a big part of the disconnect I'm seeing here in the comments. Those of us that live in private repos are likely pretty happy with how things currently work especially since we're the ones paying to use the service. If it wasn't working well for our teams, we'd find somewhere else to spend our money. That being said, we're certainly the minority when it comes to users on the platform.
        cookiecaper 11y ago
        >That being said, we're certainly the minority when it comes to users on the platform. But you're the huge majority of people who give GitHub money. It makes sense not to prioritize the pain points of open-source projects when you lose money by hosting them.
foota 11y ago
But then they'd be spammed with useless +1 comments
- donretag 11y ago
  +1
  - Rovanion 11y ago
    If one implemented issue voting then a +1 comment could automatically be converted into a vote.
    - DouweM 11y ago
      Which is almost exactly what happens on GitLab: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/687930087057027073 https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/687930087057027073 Users can use those buttons to +1 or -1, and any comments that contain nothing but an emoji (like `:+1:`) are automatically converted to emoji awards, as we call them.

peterfpf 11y ago

I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README. This normally doesn't go unnoticed. Another good example is harthur's "[UNMAINTAINED]" [1] [1] https://github.com/harthur/brain https://github.com/harthur/brain

simoncion 11y ago
> I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README. Aye. Some folks in the discussion linked to by krschultz complain that "People sometimes don't read the README and -thus- don't notice deprecation warnings.". To them I ask: "What makes you think that those sorts of people will notice anything less than an overlay that prevents them from interacting with the Github UI for that particular repo?".
- clinta 11y ago
  One concern would be around tools that fetch from github automatically. go get for example would need some sort of structured metadata if it wanted to surface an error to a user that a library is deprecated.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > One concern would be around tools that fetch from github automatically. Sure. But... like... git doesn't know anything about deprecated repos. AFAIK, that's not a feature of git's repo fetch machinery. Anything Github would do to address this would have to modify the contents of the repo, right? > ...go get for example would need some sort of structured metadata [to do reasonable repo deprecation warnings] I mean, the JavaScript development community has -collectively- decided on a huge bundle of ad-hoc standards. I bet that it would be trivial for the signatories of the open letter to decide on a tagging mechanism to use in their README files to indicate repo deprecation. Do you disagree?
    - newjersey 11y ago
      I am not your grand parent poster but I fully agree with you and I'd go further than that. The people who ask for more proprietary features (or should I say anti-features) in Github are encouraging lock-in inside of Github. Github ought to be a hub. I'd like to emphasize on the hub part as it should be one hub out of many. It should not be the center of the software universe any more than AT&T/IBM/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Uber.

TheCoreh 11y ago

> My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'. What I came up to work around this is: - Create an org named <YOUR-USERNAME>-deprecated - Move the projects to the organization - Set the avatar of the organization to your avatar, with desaturated colors (purely cosmetic, optional) https://github.com/coreh-deprecated https://github.com/coreh-deprecated