Comment by mschuster91
9 hours ago
> Everything else belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media.
There's a reason that collaborative code platform (not just GH but also GL) "issues" end up being used for much more than bugs:
- message boards suffer from the SSO friction issue. No thanks I will not sign up at some phpBB board of questionable admin quality that will get 0wned sooner than later, or have the board owner bombard me with advertising themselves.
- mailing lists are even worse usability-wise because these by design leak your email address, on top of that their management UI often enough is Mailman which means it probably still stores passwords in cleartext, and spam filters, attachment size limits and overeager virus scanners make it a living hell
- IRC suffers from context loss. Netsplit, go for a smoke and the laptop goes to sleep, whoops, you disconnected and don't see what happened in the meantime. Yes, there's bouncers, but honestly, the UX sucks hard. Also, no file transfers to a channel, no native screenshot/paste functionality.
- Discord, Slack etc. solve the pains of IRC but are walled gardens
- Social media... yikes. No, no, no. Eventually, people that follow both you and the author of some FOSS software get pissed off by your conversation spamming their feed. (Too) many are still only active on Twitter which excludes people who don't want to be on that hellsite. Bluesky, good luck finding non-commies there. Mastodon, good luck and pray that your instance operator and the instance operator of the project team didn't end up in some bxtchfight escalating in defederation. Facebook groups, not everyone wants to leak their real name.
- messenger groups (especially Telegram)... blergh. You will drown in spam.
GH/GL are the sweet spot between UX/SO friction (because pretty much everyone who would want to file an issue has an account) and features, and on top of that both platforms have deals with email providers preventing them from getting blocked. That's why these two platforms are so far superior above everything else mentioned.
> message boards suffer from the SSO friction issue
GitHub is an SSO provider and has been for a long time. This criticism is ignorant.
Aside from that, there's nothing stopping anyone from using GitHub's dedicated message boards for message board stuff, or, before those existed, shunting it all off into the "issues" of a separate "$PROJECT/community-bullshit" "repo" instead of cluttering up the actual bugtracker.
> Social media... yikes. No, no, no.
I'm talking about the appropriate-for-social-media stuff people are already posting on GitHub issues. It's like you started writing your comment and lost the context. People are today already misusing GitHub issues for this. I'm saying keep the stuff best kept to social media and email... on social media and email. Don't clutter the bugtracker with it, and for project managers: don't let other users do it either. (You will lose contributors who know how to use a bugtracker efficaciously and are accustomed to it but have a fixed time budget and don't want to have to sift through junk for the privilege of doing free and thankless QA on your software.)
> You will drown in spam.
The irony. Help. It burns.
For emphasis: Everything that isn't a bug belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media, and not on the bugtracker. Anyone who can't abide by this simple, totally reasonable request should be booted.
> GitHub is an SSO provider and has been for a long time. This criticism is ignorant.
The problem is, a "sign up to contribute" is a friction source. It will almost always leak my email. In contrast, I'm already logged in to Github.
What I'm hearing is, "Your Honor, I know that I shouldn't have blown through that stop sign, but hear me out: I wanted to. If I didn't, then I would have had to stop and wait for traffic to pass and respect other people's time. Does that strike you as reasonable? I think we can agree that it does not."
What do you think about Discourse in particular.
GH has a "Discussions" feature for message-boards attached to your project. Same sign-on as GH. Nobody turns it on.
> - mailing lists are even worse usability-wise because these by design leak your email address...
So does git and GitHub. Last I checked, authoring a git commit with an email address associated with your GitHub account is what makes GitHub attribute that commit to your account. I assume Gitlab works in a very similar way.
"But 'git clone' is soooo much harder than reading through mailing list archives!" Nah.
If you don't want to expose your email address but you still want commits to be associated to your account, Github lets you use a noreply email address [1].
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...
I actually was looking into this recently (exploring how much of a PITA changing my github email would be) and found it interesting that, while in principle your GH email is public to anyone interfacing with your commits via `git`, they have gone to some length to avoid displaying it anywhere in the web interface. The docs actually mention it being shown on your 'profile' page but I don't see it anywhere there.
> Github lets you use a noreply email address
Oh, I was unaware of that. I've not seen anyone use it, [0] but I've only paid any attention to the Big Corporate and Traditional Hacker populations.
Thanks much for the information.
[0] I'm certain that folks do use it, so folks shouldn't bother pointing out people that do.
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