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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

Would love github to add social features to opt-in to communication from maintainers. There is no good way today to email changelogs to your users.

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Email changelogs? WTF? Is there not RSS for releases, that people can subscribe to if they want those kinds of notices?

[EDIT] Answer appears to be "yes, there is" (append ".atom" to the releases URL for a repo) with the caveat that the handling of pre-releases is less than ideal.

They will if they subscribed to your repo's new releases (with GitHub's "watch" function)

The problem is that this subscribes them to everything.

I used to use watch but I could care less about every individual commit on anything other than projects I'm actively working on.

Watch is not a good substitute for a way to learn about important changes on an infrequent, regular basis (i.e. once a month emails).

Try clicking the watch button now. It changed a while ago, and you can narrow it down to certain events (releases, commits, issues, PRs, etc.)

Gotcha that's a good improvement. But this still only works by showing a visual change in your feed at the time of the release. What if I care about software but don't spend all day on Github's logged in homepage/activity feed?

Email is the only reliable way to send/receive important updates for any meaningful project.

You get an email if you subscribe to releases.

Huh, I see releases in the Github UI and I never get release emails. Maybe I have an email filter I forgot about.

You need to change your notification settings in GitHub. Maybe sending you a email of new notifications is not the default option.

Yes this is frustrating. I just changed my repo's first few lines to suggest subscribing to the mailing list rather than being an intro to the project. I've seen that a few times before and used to think it was weird. But now that I've got updates I want people to know about I'm more interested in just making sure people who are interested have access to info.

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