New "Convert issue to discussion" flow can be misleading to users and lead to reputation damage for repo maintainers

[michaelklishin]

I have just noticed a new behavior of the redesigned "Convert issue to discussion" feature. When an issue is converted, it is now closed and locked, which makes the user believe her issue was actively ignored. This makes open source software maintainers look like really cold hearted jerks.

Please redesign this flow to make it obvious to the user that

• The issue was transferred because maintainers considered it to be discussion material
• The user is welcome to continue the discussion, they are not locked out of it

Since discussions is a new feature many users are not aware of, and still believe that issues is the only way to get help on GitHub. The current workflow leaves no chance for such users to consider that the conversation should simply continue elsewhere, leading them to believe that the maintainer closed and locked the issue without any further communication.

As a result, the current flow carries very real and entirely undeserved reputation risks for reasonably popular projects.

[ShockwaveNN]

I was part of conversation @michaelklishin talking about

I've aware that discussion is new feature of GitHub, and was ok moving issue to discussion, but lock issue part was pretty unexpected for me and not look good

[ascillato2]

Totally Agree with you all. As was previously implemented was Ok. The issue was really moved to discussion. Now it only close and lock without further options (not to unlock, comment, reopen or reconvert to issue), and only COPY the first comment, the rest of the comments are not copied. This is not ok and not intuitive.

We Hope Github reconsiders the previous implementation for a healty discussion feature.

[Harmon758]

the rest of the comments are not copied

That shouldn't be the case and is not the case for any of the issues I've converted into discussions.

The converted issue can technically be unlocked, but it seems to have no effect, which is something they're looking into.

[michaelklishin]

Good for you. It is absolutely the case for every issue I converted. My team now uses a canned response before we convert that explains what's going on and that the discussion is welcome elsewhere. If your [GitHub] users have to explain to their users what your feature does, then you [GitHub] obviously missed something and need to go back to the drawing board.

[Harmon758]

I'm not sure why you're being sardonic or implying I insulted you, when my comments in this discussion have been entirely focused on the subject of the discussion (or why you're reacting with thumbs down emoji to those comments relevant to and providing information and/or further discussion/feedback to what they're replying to, in a discussion in a repository literally called feedback). I'm also not sure why you think I'm part of GitHub, but I am not.

It is absolutely the case for every issue I converted.

When I went to check this by going to the discussions in the first pinned repository on your profile, the first converted discussion on the page (sorted by the default, New), rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server#2735, has both comments from the issue it was converted from (including one from you saying you'll convert the issue to a discussion).

Regardless, I'm not going to continue this discussion by debating over unsubstantiated claims, anecdotal "evidence", and subjective views of how easy or not a banner is to miss.

[bcoconni]

@Harmon758

I'm not sure why you're being sardonic or implying I insulted you

If you are referring to the comment below: "discovering that the issue was also locked and missing the banner mentioned by @Harmon758 above adds multiple insults to this injury." then I think @michaelklishin implied that it is the fact to "discover[...] the issue was locked [...] and miss[...] the banner" that is insulting not yourself.

[Harmon758]

Please redesign this flow to make it obvious to the user that

• The issue was transferred because maintainers considered it to be discussion material
• The user is welcome to continue the discussion, they are not locked out of it

[. . .] The current workflow leaves no chance for such users to consider that the conversation should simply continue elsewhere, leading them to believe that the maintainer closed and locked the issue without any further communication.

I disagree with this. The banner at the top of the converted issue already makes it pretty obvious and explicitly clear that the conversation was moved to a discussion. It definitely doesn't have "no chance" of informing the author of this.

[ShockwaveNN]

he banner at the top of the converted issue already makes it pretty obvious and explicitly clear that the conversation was moved to a discussion

Moving issue to discussion has clear meaning, but locking discussion looks like extra step without clear explanation,

[Harmon758]

I don't think discussions can be locked, and that's not really relevant to this discussion.

[ShockwaveNN]

Or, sorry mean locking issue is not clear enough

[michaelklishin]

Yes, there is a banner. Yet if you only pay attention to GitHub notifications, e.g. emails, evidence shows that it's not clear what's going on to the person who's filed the issue. And the banner is too easy to miss, while the "X closed and locked the issue" very much stands out.

[bcoconni]

What kind of notification the OP receive when their issue is converted to a discussion ? Does the notification clearly state that the issue is converted or do they receive multiple notifications (issue closed, issue locked, new discussion - or may be a subset of those) ?

Sorry to ask that but I have never had one of my issue converted to discussion 😄

[ShockwaveNN]

As participiant of original issue I got this on email and this is defenetly not enough

[bcoconni]

As participiant of original issue I got this on email and this is defenetly not enough

Then I agree with you and @michaelklishin: the information sent to the original poster of the issue is confusing and might give them the impression that their request is blatantly rejected. Even if this is absolutely not the message that maintainers want to convey.

[michaelklishin]

Yup, it's just a couple of notifications about the issue being closed, which alone can cause a misunderstanding. Further discovering that the issue was also locked and missing the banner mentioned by @Harmon758 above adds multiple insults to this injury.

[bcoconni]

So to sum things up, I think we have a point to make to GitHub (@evi-liu ?) here:

• The banner at the top of the issue is helpful but insufficient for a sound communication with the author of the issue at stake.
• Indeed, the banner implies that the issue author have the willing to check why their issue has been closed and go the extra step to visit their issue and see what's going on.
• Unfortunately, some other users might behave differently and wrongly interpret from that point on that their request has been denied. Some egos might be bruised in the process (and we all know how quickly this happens 😄) and tell themselves: "Be damned <put the name of your project here>".

There is at least one work around: adding a comment to the issue before converting it to a discussion (or adding a comment to the discussion after the conversion happened - which is basically the same idea). However this is not satisfying because the root of the problem is a misleading notification from the GitHub platform: the issue is not closed, it is converted to a discussion.

The proposal to GitHub is therefore to create a new notification "Issue #abc has been converted to Discussion #xyz".

By the way I suggest that the topic of this discussion be renamed to something more positive if we want to attract more attention/upvotes as it seems GitHub is using this metrics to decide whether they are implementing a request or not.

[michaelklishin]

I like this summary. Thank you, @bcoconni.

[michael-hawker]

I've also actively missed the 'this has moved to a discussion' banner at the top of the issue as I'm usually scrolling to the bottom to get the latest comments, especially if it's an issue I've been to before. So their needs to also be info at the bottom of the page too.

[evi-liu]

Hi all, thank you for all of the feedback on this. We hear you, and we agree that the Convert issue to discussion flow is not ideal the way it is today. We're still in the process of debugging intermittent conversion failures, so if you experience any loss in comments or reactions upon conversion, please try to re-convert.

Message received that the current banner is insufficient for alerting users that the issue has been converted. Therefore, in addition to the blue banner on the top of the issue, we're intending to add a banner on the bottom or a timeline event indicating that the issue has been converted to a discussion. We want to ensure that there is clear traceability into the conversion process, so that users aren't left confused. Unfortunately, adding a notification event for the conversion is a non-trivial engineering effort, but we will continue to explore how to make this conversion process more seamless for both users and maintainers.

Thank you all for your patience as we continue to improve Discussions. Your feedback is invaluable.

[evi-liu]

For those following along, we've shipped the blue banner on the bottom of converted issues as well! Hopefully, this alleviates much of the confusion on why an issue has been locked and closed after it's been converted to a discussion, as there will now be a banner on the top and the bottom of an issue.

Once again, thank you all for your patience with this bug. It's a gnarly one, but I can assure you we're hard at work on fixing this and allowing y'all to get back to seamless conversions.

[bcoconni]

That's definitely a great improvement ! Thanks @evi-liu and all the team at GitHub for the hard work on that topic 👍

However, I have to say that one of the major concern we have raised in this discussion (and that @michaelklishin reminded above) has not been addressed. So, as far as I am concerned, this issue remains open.

[evi-liu]

Understood. We intend to restore the conversion functionality into what it was previously (i.e. instead of locking, the issue is deleted upon transfer). Locking is our temporary solution right now as we work on debugging as to ensure no comments are lost in the conversion.

Thank you for bearing with us as we work on fixing this gnarly, impactful bug.

[dlech]

Are there any updates on progress towards restoring the transfer-instead-of-copy functionality you can share?

[rarkins]

Did this temporary become permanent?

[michael-hawker]

Yeah, this is confusing when getting linked to an issue and seeing it's closed from an old link, but was really moved to a discussion. Having the blue box at the top helps now too, but sometimes you link to a comment in the middle of the conversation and can't see it.

Similarly, the purple color helps a bit, but it still says 'Closed'. Maybe it can say 'moved' instead?