[META] GitHub Discussions are now generally available

[alexshpilkin]

As this repository essentially uses GitHub Issues as a substitute for message board software, people might be interested to know that GitHub just rolled out its own actual message board software, GitHub Discussions, for all public repositories (it was being tested in a small number of them for the last couple of months). Whether this will be useful for this particular community, either now or once this feature matures, I don’t know, and the docs are very sparse for the moment, but I suppose it’s better to be aware of the possibility than not.

I only hope that if a switchover ever happens here, the issues are unambiguously closed so that it’s indeed a switchover and we’re not left with two separate but not quite equivalent ways of conducting a conversation. (Indeed, that’s the main source of potential silliness for this feature in general, even if user support over public bug tracker is also silly in its own way.)

[larsbrinkhoff]

We have been trying "Discussions": https://github.com/orgs/ForthHub/teams/forthhub/discussions
As you should know, because I see you commented on the very first topic. :-)

I remember there were some usability concerns about the Discussions format. I emailed GitHub support, but I don't think anything came out of it. I think this is the thread: https://github.com/orgs/ForthHub/teams/forthhub/discussions/2

[larsbrinkhoff]

I still think this https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues is a much better user interface than this https://github.com/orgs/ForthHub/teams/forthhub/discussions

[alexshpilkin]

@larsbrinkhoff I vaguely remembered about this before I posted, but I thought that it was quite a while back, and Discussions only entered limited testing in March and general release a couple of days ago, so surely I must have been misremembering?

Turns out I wasn’t misremembering, but GitHub’s product branding is extremely confusing (to be fair, I’ve yet to come across corporate product branding that wasn’t extremely confusing). There are two separate things:

• What you are linking to and I was remembering are, for lack of a better term, team discussions, which have existed for quite a while, have organization scope, are private (even for read-only access!), and do indeed look awkward to me.
• What I mentioned above are repository discussions, also known as “GitHub Discussions” with a capital D, which were only released this Tuesday, have repository scope, are public, and also look awkward to me, but in a completely different way (they kind of try to switch, depending on the sort setting, between a message board with two-level-deep threading à la Facebook comments and a Q&A site with answers and comments à la Stack Overflow?).

For how these repository discussions work, try the ones at the next.js repo (which I should’ve linked to in the initial post) and you’ll see that they’re a completely different beast from team discussions (though surely GitHub will try to unify them at some point). I also failed in my Google-fu by not finding and linking to the documentation page for repository discussions, which contrary to my initial post actually exists!

[larsbrinkhoff]

Thanks, that clear things up!

In the interest of merry experimentation, I enabled "Repository Discussions": https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/discussions
Go yonder and try it!

[larsbrinkhoff]

It seems to me the new "discussion" is more an outgrowth of "issues". So that seems promising, I think. We'll see how it plays out.

[kt97679]

I really like that when using "issues" I'm getting all updates via email. Will it work the same way with "discussions"?

[larsbrinkhoff]

I really like that when using "issues" I'm getting all updates via email. Will it work the same way with "discussions"?

I'm guessing it will! But I don't know. Try it out!

[kt97679]

Ok, posted a test message. I have the same concern as @alexshpilkin : if discussions will work better (btw do we have criteria for "better"?) we will need to do full switchover to have single place for the conversations.

[massung]

My vote would be using discussions over issues. From what I've seen discussions can't be "closed" like issues can, and my guess is that over time they'll have better support for searching and other features.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Thanks @kt97679, your test message looks good. So far I think the new "Discussions" look better than the old. But there are no defined criteria and no one in charge. But hey, it's Forth so that's normal. :-)

[kt97679]

@larsbrinkhoff so true :). I generally agree with @massung . Let's try to use "discussions". If folks will be unhappy for some reason we always can fallback to "issues" which worked quite well for us for some time already.

[phillipeaton]

Please just make sure it doesn't suffer the same issues as c.l.f