Welcome to Discussions

[ghost]

Looks like we got into the beta for GitHub Discussions. 🎉

[ghost]

From what I can tell, you at least need to be logged in to view these on our repo. But maybe only those in the beta can?

[arschles]

I think those in the beta only at the moment. Not sure if this will become public later. Also not sure if there will be "private" discussions later.

[arschles]

I don't see any threading in here. Anyone know how to do it?

[twexler]

I don't see any threading in here. Anyone know how to do it?

Seems like no, best you can do is quote.

[marwan-at-work]

what's going on here? Did GitHub acquire reddit? 😄

[marwan-at-work]

I love the "Answer" button, really helps highlight "the right comment" amongst many.

They can just add that to issues...no need for "discussions" if that's the only purpose. And upvotes are already a thing in Issues (via emojis)

[chriscoffee]

Does the number of votes do anything in terms of movement up/down the page?

[marwan-at-work]

I don't see any threading in here. Anyone know how to do it?

I like the "quote reply" button--- honestly all of this stuff is awesome, but why make it a new product?

I think separating "bug reports" and "feature/implementation discussion" would be really helpful (especially for the Go issue tracker)

But there needs to be a clear UX for that: for example:

Someone might start an issue as a bug, but then it turns into a discussion. How will that work? Can you transfer an issue to a discussion and disable commenting. on the issue side?

[twexler]

One thing I just noticed is that while all discussions seem to have IDs (seemingly the same monotonically increasing ids that issues/PRs use) is that you can't currently link to them in GFM.

I worry that overusing the beta could give the indication that there is work happening behind the scenes that the athens community isn't privy too (which we already sort of have with the maintainers room, but has a purpose). We should be careful when playing with this until it's more of a public beta.

[arschles]

Good point @twexler. When this becomes public maybe we should create a pinned discussion and/or issue that says nothing we did in here is binding, etc...

Other ideas?

[becca]

@marwan-at-work to answer a few of your questions here:

1. yes, you can currently convert issues into discussions. if you navigate to the labels page you can mass convert all issues that fit a specific label.
   • 🚨 there is no way to transfer discussions back into issues yet 🚨
2. yes, you can currently convert a SINGLE issue into a discussion. this is in the lower right hand side of the issue...similar disclaimer exists for this as #1
3. there is no functionality tied to the upvoting but we're going to add the current set of reactions back instead.
4. regarding the workflow and separation of discussions versus issues - our intention here was to create the separation for the community to have a clearer space to have discussions and their questions answered by others where possible (not just maintainers). i assume there will need to be some connections between issues <> discussions to make sure folks use the right spaces at the right time so open to your thoughts on this and what your concerns here are.

@twexler how can i help make sure you can use/test this feature earlier? the public beta may be a bit of a ways out and i'd like to help make sure your community doesn't assume your doing hidden work so let me know can i help here specifically.

[marwan-at-work]

Thank you @becca for the answers.

I'm not sure how much research has gone into discussion but I think the Go project would be a really good case study because they use "issues" exactly for discussions amongst the community and the maintainers.

And with that, there's a lot of pain points. Here's a scenario of a pain point that the Go team frequently struggles with:

1. The Go team presents a new proposal by opening an "issue" (for example this one: Proposal: A built-in Go error check function, "try" golang/go#32437)

2. The discussion about the pros, cons, and alternatives happens on the issue itself.

However, the problem is that the discussion is happening with the entire community of hundreds and potentially thousands of people.

This creates an interesting problem: not everyone can read the entire discussion but would like to voice their opinion and therefore creating a lot of slightly-duplicated opinions.

The Go team actually ends up reading all of the comments and responding to people in bulk because each bulk pretty much said the same thing.

Here's a perfect example of an issue (that is a lot more of a discussion than issue) and that one of the Go team members responded to people in bulk: golang/go#32437

I think Discussions has a really great opportunity for large projects such as this one.

One feature I can think of is that the maintainer would have the ability to "group" similar responses together to be able to respond to them and also view them together.

[becca]

@marwan-at-work thank you for the 🔗 - this is indeed a great example.

I mentioned in https://github.com/gh-community/discussions-feedback/issues/19 having one-level deep threads, which i am hopeful might help alleviate some of these concerns BUT i realize that assumes users will use threads in a way that aligns with others' expectations.

when you say grouping responses how would you envision this working for such a thread like this one? maintainers are reading all 807 comments and grouping would be a manual effort so i'm curious what we can do to help make triaging here easier (assuming there's at least threading).

[marwan-at-work]

when you say grouping responses how would you envision this working for such a thread like this one? maintainers are reading all 807 comments and grouping would be a manual effort so i'm curious what we can do to help make triaging here easier (assuming there's at least threading).

The way I InVision it is that there would be two ways to view a discussion:
The default way which looks exactly like what we have here so far (with threading and what not)
And then a "maintainers way"

The maintainers way would be that they would group comments into categoris and be able to respond to all of them

People would also be able to view that and potentially participate?

But at least it would help big-project-maintainers navigate through the plethora of comments

[marwan-at-work]

@becca the reason this would super helpful is because most people won't read all the comments and therefore they would not create a thread into similar ones. But others might find a comment that is relatable and they would create a thread response with whatever additions they'd like to add.

[marwan-at-work]

@becca it took me a while to find this comment (since the issue about 1 thousand responses) but check out this comment here where the lead engineer on the Go team actually created his own program to group comments and respond to them: golang/go#32437 (comment)

Which makes me think: It would be an awesome feature (on both issues and discussions) to look for responses by a particular person -- but that's a separate thing lol

[marwan-at-work]

One last comment for now: if an issue has many comments, but they were grouped, then people would be encouraged to look at that view before they add their own comment that can be potentially similar.

Therefore, instead of having to go through 1 thousand comments to see whether it's worth adding your own comment, you might just go through 20 "groups of comments" which would be a lot faster.

Therefore, when a maintainer adds a comment to an existing "group", they should also have a short description for what these comments have in common, maybe just a title, or maybe a tweet-level description.

[cheshire137]

It would be an awesome feature (on both issues and discussions) to look for responses by a particular person

Makes me think of Blizzard forums where replies from Blizzard staff or the developers are highlighted compared to other replies. Also brings to mind the badges we have in comments like 'Author' and 'Maintainer', to indicate the author's relationship to the repository.

I could see a filter, perhaps in the sidebar, to show only comments by a particular user, or to show only comments by any maintainer of the repository.

[arschles]

Having that filter would be super cool in the FAQ as well!

[arschles]

From what I can tell, you at least need to be logged in to view these on our repo. But maybe only those in the beta can?

@robjloranger Yup, afaik it's only those in the beta who can see this and any of the tangential functionality

[cheshire137]

One thing I just noticed is that while all discussions seem to have IDs (seemingly the same monotonically increasing ids that issues/PRs use) is that you can't currently link to them in GFM.

@twexler this is working now! For example, this is discussion #1536.