[Announcement]Disabling GitHub Discussions tab for dotnet/aspnetcore

[Pilchie]

Discussion issue for aspnet/Announcements#452

Rationale

Since we enabled GitHub Discussions, we've found them quite hard to manage for a repository the size of aspnetcore. Without labelling and assigning capabilities, there are no effective ways to triage or track what discussions have been looked at, or who has the next step.

To that end, we're going to disable them, and encourage people to just use issues instead - that way we can continue to ensure they get reviewed by the team, and acted upon if they are in fact bugs, etc.

When will this happen

I'll make the switch in a week, on 2021-02-11.

What happens to existing discussions

They will no longer be visible, but as far as we can tell, GitHub still keeps them, and if we ever enable discussions again, they will come back.

Where do I discuss this

Please leave feedback below.

[SIkebe]

[Announcement]Disabling GitHub Issues tab for dotnet/aspnetcore

Is this title right? You mean "Discussions tab" instead of "Issues tab"?

[Pilchie]

Grr. Even when you get people to review your posts... Fixed above.

[tomkerkhove]

A pity, feel free to share feedback with @becca @evi-liu to improve the product if you want

[ffMathy]

This is how I feel about GitHub discussions in general. No one really reads them it seems. People create issues either way.

[tomkerkhove]

This is how I feel about GitHub discussions in general. No one really reads them it seems. People create issues either way.

I have a few projects where they are very useful

[jzabroski]

@ffMathy I read discussions on my repository and convert some issues to discussions.

That said, I can appreciate the reasons why dotnet is disabling it.

I think, also, for such a huge repo like dotnet with thousands of issues, issues themselves need improved tools to keep track of what was said.

[Pilchie]

I did talk to @evi-liu about the issues we've faced, and I've gone ahead and made the change now.

[jzabroski]

One of the pieces of feedback I gave @evi-liu and @becca during the GH Discussions beta is that the moderation tool for comments is weak across issues and discussions. The example I gave was EntityFrameworkCore repository thread on missing support for many-to-many. GitHub Issues has the collapsed comments feature, which randomly eradicates useful replies. There's no easy way to highlight specific comments as useful to a product owner grooming a backlog. For example, the product owner knows many-to-many is a useful feature for an ORM, but also knows resources why that it is years away from being done, but doesn't want to lose track of good conversation and anticipates the conversation might grow to 1000+ replies over time.

Whereas Discussions has an upvote feature for answers, there is no way to upvote "good points". Plus, a lot of Issues discussions I deal with personally are people landing on some issue from Google search and then spamming an old issue with "oh, this is my problem as well" without any details or stack trace. In this sense, I wish GitHub had Google Analytics-type features to hone in on where people came from when visiting an issue. Was it StackOverflow? Was it a blog post? Was it a search engine? Ideally, it also tracks a heat map of what the user spent time reading on the Issue/Discussion before posting a comment. I have a relatively small but popular C# nuget package with 5M+ downloads and another with 2M+ downloads and so while my network effect is not the same as dotnet, I imagine there is a concordance of pain points around these concerns. I also believe that some of these Google Analytics-type features are beneficial for open source sponsorship, since we learn more about our user demographics.

Hope that helps.

Thank you, @Pilchie

[brunobritodev]

Hi @Pilchie is that possible to get the text I wrote of a discussion back? So I can open an issue instead.

#28263