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betterscientificsoftware / bssw.io

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Need resources on how to get people to use issue trackers instead of emailing bug reports #826

Open bernhold opened 3 years ago

bernhold commented 3 years ago

This is for a request from Slaven Peles of the EsaSGD project.

Need resources on how to get people (in this case, within the project team) to use issue tracker to submit bug reports instead of using email.

markcmiller86 commented 3 years ago

Need resources on how to get people (in this case, within the project team) to use issue tracker to submit bug reports instead of using email.

Hmmm...IMHO...no way to enforce this. You can strongly encourage it through various means but we still get stragglers that submit poorly defined bug reports via email. Just have to deal with it. One strategy is to severely deprioritize such interactions so the users engaging in that behavior feel enough pain to adjust their practice 😄

bernhold commented 3 years ago

Yes, I've seen projects where maintainers are pretty aggressive in pushing people to use their issue tracker, and follow the template there in terms of information requested with the issue.

There can be a fine line on this. If your project has a user mailing list, you probably need to provide some level of assistance when people report problems. But of course often, the problem is a user error in some form or another rather than a bug in the software.

markcmiller86 commented 3 years ago

you probably need to provide some level of assistance when people report problems.

Yes, that is something you simple can't get around. Understanding what problem the user encountered is often 80% of the effort involved in helping them. That is why we prefer discussions over issues...

FYI...the VisIt project just lask week ended our email support services. We moved to GitHub discussions. We also imported all our old email as discussions. Anyone wanting VisIt support will have to go through our discussions (or issues). Some other details are there if interested.

bernhold commented 3 years ago

I have not yet really examined Discussions. I'm curious why you think it was worth the trouble to shift everything over and import your entire history. If that's easier said than written, I'd be happy to chat at some point.

markcmiller86 commented 3 years ago

Sure we can chat about that if you want. Short answer...multiple users requested ability to search/browse the email archive. And, that feature of the existing archive had fallen into disrepair.

Discussions are discoverable from search engines like Google and are searchable and browseable. It did require learning GraphQl necessary to write a python script and extensive testing before we actually did it. One side effect, our PR and issue numbers are now 5 digit numbers. They used to be 3 digit. Thats because GitHub uses a single local address space (e.g. numbering) for issues, prs, discussions.