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> All they need now is a place to get coding questions answered I think Github issues has already started doing that. Personally, I've been finidng more help f
by owaislone 7y ago
> All they need now is a place to get coding questions answered
I think Github issues has already started doing that. Personally, I've been finidng more help from Github issues than Stack Overflow, plus I find myself asking questions or submitting bugs on GH a lot more than asking something on Stack Overflow. In fact, I've not asked anything on SO for years now.
- carlosdp 7y agoI think YMMV on this, cause I also know of a lot of repos that explicitly close any issues that are support requests because they fill up the issue list so quickly. I think having it separate as in SO is still going to be the move unless there's some big re-organization of how Issues work.
- phreack 7y agoThis is quite true but it's boggling why neither Github nor its competitors haven't added a 'questions' tab to public repos where people are explicitly allowed to ask questions, and have them answered by maintainers or other users.
- GordonS 7y agoQuite a few repos point people towards Gitter instead.
- Lord_Zero 7y agoWhich is usually a ghost town. Maintainers of small libs usually don't even monitor SO. Issues is the fastest way to get high visibility and get a question answered quickly since newcomers usually read GitHub issues to see if there are any serious things to worry about before using the package.
- your-nanny 7y agoPlease don't put support questions in issues!
- GordonS 7y agoPlease have an alternative then!
- your-nanny 7y agoIf I post code to a GitHub, I'm happy for you to use it, and I'm happy to learn about bugs in the code. But what obligates me to facilitate support, or respond to support requests? People should grow up.
- GordonS 7y agoPlainly you're not obligated to, but if you want to actually grow the userbase it makes sense. If you really don't want to help with (reasonable) support requests, then an alternative is to make that abundantly clear in your README. > People should grow up Not sure what this childish quip adds to your otherwise sensible comment?
- Lord_Zero 7y agoI personally will pass on any project/lib that has a bunch of unanswered issues, or a bunch of auto closed stale issues. Unless the project is big enough to have an active SO or Gitter community.
- your-nanny 7y agothis assumes that posting it to GitHub is actually intended to facilitate its use by other people.
- owaislone 7y agoIssues aren't used as people generally use SO. Questions like "how do X". Most people use issues to report bugs, request features and most prominently contact the authors when things either don't work as expected or the software lacks documentation about how certain things are supposed to work. I as a user and maintainer of OSS packages prefer such questions in issues than on some random site like SO which I won't be monitoring. Issues is a great place to consolidate all the knowledge around a package. Also, most of such questions can be considered as bugs, feature requests or just plain lack of documentation.