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...<p>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 :/
New features are great, but I wish they'd make more of an investment in improving their core code review functionality. The lack of an "interdiff" view (between revisions of a PR) and the lack of a proper way to mark PRs as dependent on one another really limit the utility compared to other code review platforms (thinking specifically of Gerrit and Phabricator/Differential here).
One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Sorely needed.
Tons of projects use issues for discussions/questions..or redirect to stackoverflow.<p>I wonder what will be the reduction in stackoverflow due to this ?<p>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
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.
A problem with such products offered by GitHub is the fact that they're connected to a single repo. This is maybe suitable for monorepo situations or simple open-source libraries. However, teams work differently and need to manage backlogs across many repositories. The context is usually a team, project, etc. This requires pulling in multiple issues across repos into one backlog along with abilities to manage this backlog and calculate metrics.<p>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.<p>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 <a href="https://phacility.com/phabricator/" rel="nofollow">https://phacility.com/phabricator/</a> for example?
Congrats on shipping!<p>I like how quickly GitHub is shipping new features now, compared to earlier: the mobile app, Actions, Sponsors, security scanning, etc.<p>That said, I was a little disappointed that Discussions is essentially identical to Issues :(.<p>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.
Phew. I've pretty much given up subscribing to issues on well-known projects because they so often get swamped by useless posts from people desperate to take their opinions for a walk (I pity the maintainers).<p>Hopefully this will reduce the issue spam problem.
I have no idea if my suggestion four years ago helped but am glad they finally implemented it :) <a href="https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44</a>
This links to Zeit, which seems like a kind of advert for their product?<p>How do we actually find out about GitHub Discussions and opting-into it? Or did GitHub only enrol one company into the beta?
Interesting, I thought this was going to have something to do with their acquisition of Spectrum, but it appears to be an entirely separate in-house feature. I wonder what's going to happen to Spectrum longer term then.<p><a href="https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g...</a>
This looks like the perfect mechanism to help us disambiguate code-related items from discussion items. We could say something like "Close this issue and link it to a new discussion"... Will give this a hard look when it's available on our org account.
I've been waiting for something similar to this for a long time. There's a lot of questions & topical discussion that don't fit well into issue.<p>I wasn't able to find GitHub page covering this feature, so the link to to Next.js's repo discussions.
Aren't all issues discussions in essence? I think they'd have been better of just renaming issues and adding categories like "Issue", "Discussion" etc. Some projects already do this via labels.
I'd assume that this has a similar scope to team discussions[0] released a few years ago. At the moment most larger projects have communities elsewhere, and smaller projects use issues for this king of discussion.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/" rel="nofollow">https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/</a>
Will there be an option for internal discussion? For example ticking off the "internal" checkbox makes the thread visible to team members and collaborators only.
I'm not sure if this is necessary. Github, from the beginning, is a platform where we host our source code. I've never needed a discussion board because there are other sites that are precisely serving discussion boards, like StackOverflow.
The idea of having everything on the same platform sounds easy but that is also taking out the opportunity of being a simple and elegant tool. Microsoft is changing Github since they acquired.<p>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... ???<p>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.<p>Anyways...<p>I wanna ask something different, What do you think if StackOverFlow adds git hosting? Will it work?
Tangential question, is github a proof that not every complex app has to be an SPA and it can worked really well or is this legacy thing from their part?<p>Curious to know if they feel they could iterate faster new features for the UI if it were an SPA.
It is only natural progression here. Heck, I am surprised it took this long. Considering the fact that in many Github projects, "Issues" were being used for discussions, questions, often tangents.
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.
One problem with GitHub's version of these features is how they're tied to repos or organizations. My team works on many projects across repos and GitHub orgs and we have to use ZenHub instead of GitHub Projects because of these barriers.<p>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.