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by mjw1007 622 days ago
I think the biggest weakness of github issues is that the main content it shows when you visit an issue page is the original report.

That's very often unhelpful because:

- it's likely that the actual problem wasn't understood at that point (it's likely to be describing a symptom, rather than a bug)

- it's quite possible the original reporter wasn't very good at writing bug reports

- issues often remain open after the main underlying problem is fixed, because there's some small remaining part that's unsettled.

I'd much prefer it if the topmost part of the page was reserved for a space, maintained by whoever's responsible for dealing with the issue, describing the current understanding of the problem and the current status.

Then the orignal report and further discussion could be laid out under that as at present.

It's possible to get roughly this now, by repeatedly editing the initial message. But the UX isn't ideal, and more importantly it isn't culturally expected.

(Of course this isn't a github-specific problem. But github are in a better position than most to offer a fix.)

3 comments

GitHub issues have edit history now IIRC, so the maintainer can just edit the ticket in these cases, and still have the original text available under the "edited" submenu.
Issues are a mess because they get used like bulletin boards for any random brain fart anyone has, despite Issue Templates trying to plead otherwise.

IMO the way to fix this is to gestate all issues in Discussions. Then, when a clear and agreed resolution is hammered out there, a maintainer creates an Issue (or just does a PR) referencing that Discussion. This would have the side effect of encouraging people to contribute to projects more when they can clearly see what needs picking up.

I often edit the title and description of issues.

I usually let the original content after a

### Original message

...