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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

I like GitHub issues as they are. I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.

I find it strange that some project maintainers get annoyed when people use the issues section to post questions. What's wrong with that? A question can reveal design failures about your software... Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with.

I do think there should be a +1/like button though.

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Have you ever tried to maintain a popular OS project on Github? Github issues feel great until you start using them at scale, and then they start to fall apart without some structure. This is especially pronounced in open source where many issues come from people who aren't familiar with what information you need in an issue to quickly resolve it.

I don't think the authors are requesting that this be made mandatory for all repos, but instead they just want the option to set up rules for repos they maintain. As someone giving up their free time to offer software for the rest of us, it seems only fair to let them set the rules about what they need before they can resolve an issue.

The biggest issue I see OSS maintainers running into is that they likely aren't the voice that Github listens to most anymore. If they can get some companies that pay for Github Enterprise to sign their letter as well that would likely help prioritize these features.

My project's main repo has 150 issues (only 7 still open) and it works out pretty well. Usually contributors will answer each other's questions and help close issues.

I suppose that could be a problem if you have 7000+ issues (as is the case for Docker) - But those projects represent an extremely small percentage of all OSS projects on GitHub. Also, these projects usually have a lot of contributors, so maybe those contributors could help filter through and tag/close issues as necessary?

The request was to allow maintainers to define a template or have the ability to add fields. So the formats would be on a project by project basis.

> Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with.

This is just silly.

Not so. For my project, I noticed on several occasions that different people were asking the same questions and that prompted me to rethink the design of the project a bit and it greatly improved the community engagement as a result.

That's my point. Questions are a good thing. You don't "design away" user's questions.

Sure, sometimes that's the case. In many other situations it's just people being almost comically lazy.

Why should maintainers not get annoyed if people ignore the proper support channels (which often have a great community of users to help) and further burden the developers instead?

>I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.

The thing is, if they implemented issue formatting in the way the posted document describes, the default would be exactly what it is now. Giving maintainers more control can't possibly be a bad thing.

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