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by scrollaway 3966 days ago
> If it's for general discussions about the "future of the project" or bigger-picture topics, I'd use Discourse. It's a really nice way to organize discussions that are one step removed from code-related issues.

This is what is appealing and Github offering a builtin-to-github solution for it, with linking to Github accounts, autoformatting etc (like in issues) and so on. There is so much potential.
1 comments
dvanduzer 3966 days ago
Why can't you just have those discussions in issues? Create a "future of the project" label.
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david-given 3966 days ago
That's an interesting idea (one of my big blockers for migrating my projects off SourceForge is what to do with the mailing lists).

The issue UI is a little forum-like but is pretty clunky, and, of course, doesn't interact with email very well. Plus you need people to manually tag each issue with 'discussion'.

Are there any UI tweaks that could simplify this? For example, a way to provide a 'new issue' link with default labels?

(Also, is there a good way to import data as issues? I have a tonne of mbox archives that need to go somewhere.)

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scrollaway 3966 days ago
Because then users can't simply send an email to create a new topic to talk about...
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zeckalpha 3966 days ago
So that's the one blocker? Creating an issue via email?
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scrollaway 3966 days ago
No, the blocker is setting up mailing lists with a forum-like interface (cf. discourse), but integrated to github (uses the github account) and without actually having to do the setup. Also, without polluting issues.
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e12e 3966 days ago
Actually opening issues via email would be nice to. Trac isn't perfect, but I remember email2trac[1] quite fondly. Combined with email notifications on change, it made it easy to forward bug/error-reports to a trac instance, and automatically create an issue. Or just let support@ go straight to trac.

I still think having an email interface (as in: in addition to a REST API) is very useful. Having a web interface as well isn't bad either.

[1] https://oss.trac.surfsara.nl/email2trac

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dvanduzer 3966 days ago
Good project-specific labels to GH issues solves the "polluting" problem. The label/tag system is nicely flexible.

It sounds like what you really want is nested threads and top quoting and/or interstitial quote/response features?

(Arguably what you really need is commonly called a conference.)

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richmarr 3966 days ago
You can do that via API, so it's pretty trivial to set up using an integrator like Zapier or tray.io.
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zeckalpha 3966 days ago
Too bad you can't open a pull request to GitHub.com, no?
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