Convince github to create an official public place to post and discuss issues and feature requests for github.com (aka: Make this repo unnecessary)

[isaacs]

Just what the title says.

I want to post issues for github.com on github.com, and discuss them with other github users, so that's why this repo exists. But it shouldn't exist. Github should take this over, and make it a thing.

This is valuable for all the same reasons why public issues forums on open source projects and other websites are valuable: it allows users to discuss and refine a use case that they're trying to get help with, allows us to help each other, and then when githubbers respond, it is clear that it's an issue that's being worked on and planned, so we don't feel ignored or neglected.

Of course, people often email support@github.com with issues about their credit cards, usernames, ssh keys, and other things that might contain private info. So it would take some care to help ensure that doesn't happen. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to add a feature to github issues that filters out likely private information, like anything matching /{[0-9]{4} ?){4}/ or whatnot could be replaced with XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX.

[karenetheridge]

@barcher: most comment boxes use markdown. This results in a large typeface (like a <h1> html tag) when pasting something starting with #, e.g. from a Makefile.

The solution is to use backticks on a single line, three backticks to start/end a block, or indent your block by four columns.

[Mule3044]

hi guys, can any one help me how to publish layers automatically in geoserver using python?

[TPS]

So, I've discovered recently that @GitHub does have some public-facing issue trackers!

Please read project descriptions, so as to post issues in correct spot:

• https://github.com/github/markup
• https://github.com/jch/html-pipeline

& some notable, interesting extras:

• https://github.com/github/government.github.com
• https://github.com/github/roskomnadzor
• https://github.com/github/octo-recipes

If you @all find anything else useful @ https://github.com/github (or anyplace else :wink:), please post here!

[e-volusian]

Where is the "official" place to suggest and/or vote on features? I use gh personally and my company has a large enterprise installation. Need the ability to include wikis in search.

EDIT: really should just be able to search everything, meaning: code, issues, wiki, (i don't know what else there is but anything that somebody types in at any point should be searchable)

[kenorb]

@Earthling1980 The "official" way is by going to Help section and Contact Support. They're responding quiet quickly if you've any issues. You can also suggest any features, so they can add to their internal list. I did that couple of times, and the feedback was positive.

[jep-dev]

I'd like a way to search for usernames and repository names not on Github. Or, better yet, a simple unused name generator based on some keywords you'd like to include. It's easy enough to rename yourself and your projects, but it's less advisable once you start to gain recognition.

I'm posting this here as opposed to sending it in directly (Contact Support?) because I wanted to gauge interest first, and it also may be better-suited for an independent project rather than an integrated feature.

Update - found http://mrsharpoblunto.github.io/foswig.js/, definitely a step in the right direction. It'll still suggest things like "Github.me", and I'm not sure if it checks for collisions with existing projects/users/brands.

[guelo]

UI request: When looking at a diff the file names should be sticky as you scroll down so you can tell which file you're in the middle of.

[grant-roy]

Please make gists searchable, at least the titles. Having to page through all of my gists to find the one I'm looking for is really annoying. I really love gists, I've just accumulated a fair number of them and now it's cumbersome to use.

[barcher]

@karenetheridge That makes sense for a comment, but perhaps not a branch name. Alternatively, why would the branch name require markdown formatting?

[barcher]

Nevermind. That's the first line of a commit, not a branch name. Still, I'm not convinced that line 1 needs formatting 😞

[oblogic7]

I would like a setting at the organization level that forces display of real names instead of user names on commits and PRs. Maybe other places as well.

[adis-io]

I would like a badge on wiki tab that displays wiki pages count.

[strugee]

@oblogic7 @adisos file new issues (and be sure to contact GitHub support, too).

[animedbz16]

Came across this post to find that GitHub doens't use their own issue tracker for their own projects. I would have thought they would at least have a public issue tracking even if their code is closed source.

Maybe the one reason they don't use their issue tracking is because its not actually that useful, how would they know what to improve if they aren't using it for themselves.

I personally use GitLab which is an open source self hosted GitHub alternative, they also provide a free public/private repository hosting on their main domain as well, but their issue tracking is much more advanced especially now that they have rolled out issue boards which is similar to having your own built in trello.

I would highly recommend GitLab for those that want to use a product that is open source and one where their issues are tracked in the open and since the code is open source you can even submit your own merge requests.

[timotheecour]

+1, Gitlab eats its own dogfood and seems to have a lot more features. EDIT: here's the link: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

[cirosantilli]

Now just wait: https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-announcing-new-tools-forums-and-features

[kenorb]

It seems there is a place at: https://platform.github.community/top, but only for discussing the Platform API endpoints, GraphQL API, Integrations, and Early Access Program.

It's more likely they'll extend it for some extra categories.

Secondly, there is also: GitHub profile, where you can report the features/issues at the specific components. For example issues with markup syntax and similar.

[cirosantilli]

@kenorb you might be right! Discourse is rocking it those days, and it is also Rails based.

[ninjasort]

It looks like github is preparing their Github Community Forum for a release in 2017. Without knowing too much about whether it will include Feature Requests. Here's a cool app that could be evaluated as an alternative way to handle them: https://productpains.com/

[troycurtisjr]

Like many others on this thread, I embarked on finding the "official" issue tracker to suggest a feature of rendering any README.* as the front page of your repo. Useful if you have repos that are nested when you use something like vcsh to control dotfiles in your home directory (all the repos can't have the same name file at the toplevel!) Not having this feature, and then not finding a good place to provide public feature request on this made me very disappointed.

As such I've decided to relocate my repos (which are all admittedly small and meaningless to the wider world) to gitlab.com. Honestly it probably makes more sense for me anyway, since I just rolled out self-hosted gitlab in my day job.

Just thought I should contribute a +1 to the public discussion issue tracker talk though, since otherwise it leaves a bit of a bad taste. Luckily for github, they are still the place to do this open source project repository hosting kind of thing, at least for the time being.

[kenorb]

@troycurtisjr For requesting features about rendering README.* files, please use the following repo at: https://github.com/github/markup

[mihai-dbpx]

On the Graphs page under Network, it would be good to also show the year of the commits. Currently it only displays month and day but year would be useful. I was looking at a repo that was showing commits from Jan to August and I thought they were made in 2016 but in fact they were made in 2015.

[strugee]

@mihai-dbpx so file a new issue - don't just comment on a semi-random old one. And be sure to send your feedback to GitHub via their contact page, since (as I'm sure you know from reading the README) GitHub doesn't monitor this repository.

[fyngyrz]

Github should be monitoring for ways they can improve themselves. Writing code to watch for keyphrases like " Github should" is something any script-kiddy could manage. The real problem isn't that they don't monitor; the real problem is that they don't act.

[strugee]

@fyngyrz they should be, but they aren't. See the README. GitHub has unequivocally stated that they don't monitor this repo. That's why this very issue exists.

[timotheecour]

See also https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/152 How to report a bug on github? #152

Same useless answer from github: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/152#issuecomment-4173208

You can ping us at support-blackhole@github.com.

don't care

[holman]

Ha, my bad. I was in a bad place when I responded with the "don't care", and I've been out of the company for two years now, so I still don't care but in a much nicer way now. ;)

[yairEO]

Are you using a repo and there's a bug which is open for a year, that you really want to be fixed? Are you waiting endlessly for some new feature requested in the Issues section? Does the maintainer seem to have no time for the repository and is being slow? not their fault.. people are busy, and working for free is still working for free.

An Idea which could change all that!

Scenario:

1. You are constantly refreshing to see if some issue is resolved. A year passes.
2. Github places a button next to the issue saying "pay to promote"
3. Anyone can pay any amount they want to promote fixing the bug / making the feature work
4. Funds are darknet/kickstarter style, where no money is being transferred until all parties are happy (bug is closed and the people who paid confirm this, then the money passes)

This does not contradicts with the spirit of open-source. this simply is a way to push progress and kill procrastination (or neglect) by the maintainer.

---

As a maintainer myself, I get emails offering me money to help making code adjustments. so I thought, why not making this an integral part of Github? where the change will be directly integrated into the system. Think about it!

[animedbz16]

GitHub is losing a lot of its base mainly due to its lack of development of features that people require.

GitLab is taking over this market as they have a holistic vision of developing a single unified platform to manage everything from coding, issue tracking, ci/cd, chat, deployments, app and server monitoring, etc, etc, etc.

GitHub may have been state of the art 8 years, ago but they are rapidly falling behind and many customers do not want to pay to integrate so many products or rely on GitHub hosting their own code so that when GitHub is DDoS'ed everyone is waiting around not able to push code changes through their build process.

People should really checkout what GitLab has to offer and consider switching providers or self hosting GitLab on your own hardware as many others are doing.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is-building-a-coder-s-paradise-it-s-not-coming-cheap

https://blog.codepen.io/2017/01/24/114-gitlab/

[TPS]

@isaacs @cirosantilli @all: Re: @yairEO's idea above to fund this repo/wish-/buglist we've here, has anyone approached, e.g., https://www.bountysource.com/ or equivalent for an effectual method to "crowdfund" (really, mass-bribe 🤑) the improvements we individually want to get done?

I figure this would be the 😁🥕 to @animedbz16's 😤🏏|🗡️, above.

[cirosantilli]

@TPS not gonna work IMHO, GH already has a lot of cash

[TPS]

@cirosantilli …& @GitHub has a lot of coders [citation needed] with a lot of other assigned priorities, but what other positive option does 1 have? It doesn't seem even paid membership (outside, perhaps large corporate subscription) influences priorities much.

[animedbz16]

Just keep in mind that GitHub code base is not open source.

If you were paying to self host GitHub Enterprise, you may want to be aware that GitHub disclosed a major security flaw where the same pre-generated SSH Host keys were being used for all installations of GitHub Enterprise on 2.x. https://enterprise.github.com/releases/2.7.4/notes

This basically means that this was around since late 2014 and disclosed late 2016 and that many clients could have been subjected to man in the middle attack and that they corrected this issue for only supported version. This is a pretty major oversight the everyone running GitHub Enterprise during that time frame were/are using the same SSH keys, subjecting all of these users to the possibility of man in the middle attack.

When you have closed source / proprietary software it is typically much more difficult for anyone to identify these types of issues and you can only really take a vendor at their word for performing regular security audits.

While GitHub is the largest open source hosting provider on earth, but I find it somewhat ironic that they themselves don't buy into open sourcing their own software. Or that those who open source their own rely on a provider who doesn't have the same philosophy.

@TPS The alternative would be to use an open source product such as GitLab where all issues are open to public discussion / debate and one could either wait for those to be ideas to be implemented by the core team or someone else or if it is that critical you could implement this yourself and submit a merge request to be included for everyone as many others do.

GitLab dog foods their own software so they experience similar issues as many users, but are often one or two steps ahead of them and already enhance their product before their customers actually run into the same issues.

GitLab rolls out feature releases every single month for the last 60+ months on the 22nd, while releases many bug/security updates in between. Compare this with GitHub's release schedule where maybe only 4 feature releases occur a year.

If you really look at some of the new features that GitHub is announcing / releasing, it almost seems it due to competition from GitLab, for example:

GitLab announces the following features are actually implemented in the following releases:

• Issue Board / Project management (available in GitLab 8.11 on August 22, 2016)
• Requiring Approvals before merging code (available in GitLab 7.12 since June 22, 2015)
• Enforcing 2 Factor Authentication (available in GitLab 7.11 since May 22, 2015)
• SAML SSO (available in GitLab 7.12 since June 22, 2015)
• Code reviews / resolve discussions (available in 8.11 release since August 22, 2016)

Then GitHub announces on September 14, 2016, that essentially all of the above will eventually be implemented in the near future.

• https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-announcing-new-tools-forums-and-features

This is just a one minor example, but you if you look back you can see this seems to be a recurring event, for many features:

• LDAP Sync
  • GitLab - 6/10/2014
  • GitHub - 1/20/2015
• Award Emoji / Reactions
  • GitLab 11/22/2015
  • GitHub - Announced 3/10/2016
• Protected Branches
  • GitLab - 4/22/2014
  • GitHub - 10/13/2015

Personally, we have been using GitLab for the last 5+ years and it is truly amazing to have so much built into one product and have it completely integrated together, all while constantly receiving monthly updates that continue to improve their product.

[Super3222]

I'm pretty new at this suggesting thing, but I want to make a request: Can you perhaps make an alert/notification system for whenever a user is tagged to an issue/PR? Maybe there could be a list of your notifications on the profile page. It could also work for whenever the group that you're in gets tagged as well.

I understand that these notifications currently go through email, but not everyone expects such an email from github and there's instances where people never check it.

[strugee]

@Super3222 that's existed for years and years. https://github.com/notifications

Also, in the future, please don't comment with random suggestions on this issue. GitHub doesn't monitor this repository, so you should get in touch with support (click "Contact GitHub" in the page footer) and then file a different issue in this repository to document your support request publicly.

[stuartpb]

@cirosantilli Can we maybe get this issue locked, with any discussion about this specific meta-topic (GitHub having a proper public issue tracker) happening in a new issue that can be more closely pruned from the get-go of people posting comments for things that should be separate issues (like suggestions)?

[stuartpb]

Alternately, can we start deleting off-topic comments in this thread? (I volunteer to be a moderator / contributor if doing so would require more hands on deck.)

[stuartpb]

And can we add a heading to the OP that reiterates that this issue is specifically about GitHub not having their own public issue tracking, and that posting about other things should be done by filing a new issue?

[lantz]

It's baffling that I can't submit bug reports or feature requests for GitHub itself using an issue tracker of some sort!

It's also annoyingly asymmetric - pretty much any active open source project hosted on GitHub has some kind of issue/bug tracker, either on GitHub itself or elsewhere. Indeed, it's easy to submit issues on my project and its associated web site (hosted here naturally) - why not GitHub itself?

I realize that clueless (and occasionally malicious) idiots love to submit random questions and off-topic nonsense into bug tracking systems, but you can reduce this by using a form - in fact GitHub has a feature for this!

Public issue trackers provide a beneficial user service of transparency, accountability, and – most importantly – information which can help people resolve problems and come up with productive solutions.

In contrast, only accepting bug reports via an email black hole provides zero transparency and no accountability, and provides no insight for other people with similar issues.

[erkinalp]

every single project hosted on GitHub has an issue tracker. It can be disabled on project settings.

[strugee]

@lantz please don't comment unless you have actionable information. There are a lot of people subscribed to this thread and your comment generated spam for each and every one of them.

@mlibre seriously? Did you not see https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/6#issuecomment-278523707 which is right there? Please don't post unrelated issues in this thread.

[lantz]

@strugee Please refrain from trying to censor people's thoughtful contributions to the discussion, be they arguments for or against a fix, suggested approaches, addressing or mitigating possible downsides of certain approaches, or suggesting potential workarounds.

[lantz]

@erkinalp Thanks for your refutation of my hyperbole (though technically github does provide the issue tracker feature to every project.) Noted and adjusted for clarity and the literal-minded.

[strugee]

@lantz sorry, my bad for getting annoyed and wording my reply too harshly.

I wasn't saying don't contribute to this discussion. Workarounds or discussing different approaches is super helpful and appropriate for this thread. What is not appropriate is "+1"s or any equivalent to +1s, because they're useless and generate spam. The reason I responded to you is that your comment appeared to be just another +1, albeit much longer than usual - I'd be happy to be corrected but I don't really see any information in your comment that wasn't already discussed to death in this thread. Again, bear in mind that there are presumably a lot of people subscribed to this thread. The 51 participants certainly are; I wouldn't be surprised if there are hundreds more subscribers that don't show up anywhere on the page.

Hope that clarifies my position - again, my apologies for being rude.

[clarkbw]

For anyone finding this issue now there are several new ways to connect with GitHub that were not available when this issue was created.

We have a maintainers program which is designed for maintainers of open source projects to connect with other maintainers and provide early feedback on features. A number of GitHub staff (including myself) participate in that group, though the early access portion does require an agreement to not disclose pre-release features.

GitHub also recently announced the GitHub community forum which is open to all users. There are GitHub staff and community members reading and posting there. The How to use GitHub section allows for bugs and feature requests to be posted.

I follow this repo (and did before I worked at GitHub) and try to work within it but as I don't have access to manage the issues its hard to keep it accurate. Many issues are partially solved and / or have a lot of off-topic chatter that makes them hard to understand.

As always you can contact via https://github.com/contact or support@github.com

[TPS]

@clarkbw: If you flag @cirosantilli (or, quite rarely, @isaacs; also, I'm not aware of any other "moderators"), they have the access to manage issues pretty quickly if convinced via publicly available evidence.

But, welcome aboard! It's amazing to have an employee admitting following along here, other than the standard form response.

[cirosantilli]

@clarkbw "How to use GitHub" is not very specific, and will be cluttered with "howto" question in addition to actual feature requests and bugs (I wouldn't even know that that was a good place for features and bugs based on that name).

If you add a Bug + Feature request place on that forum + a way to clearly mark threads as closed, I would consider it.

But still, anything will be more cognitive overload than just using Git Hub issues which everyone already knows how to use.

Here we can just close howto threads once something becomes possible / fixed.

I would just recommend that GH just make a https://github.com/github/github issue tracker, and move all tickets from here to there.

And implement some of the features requested in this forum, which you make your issue tracker even better.

[clarkbw]

@clarkbw: If you flag @cirosantilli (or, quite rarely, @isaacs; also, I'm not aware of any other "moderators"), they have the access to manage issues pretty quickly if convinced via publicly available evidence.

Thanks! I wasn't aware that there might be people still actively managing this repo.

Here we can just close howto threads once something becomes possible / fixed.

If you'd prefer this system I can appreciate that. GitHub doesn't have an official public feature request system, I was offering alternatives of which I know work and weren't in place when this repo was created.

For now I'm happy to participate more in this repo.

[cirosantilli]

@clarkbw if you can use your GH superpowers to contact isaacs and request to be made Collaborator, do so :-)

[clarkbw]

@clarkbw if you can use your GH superpowers to contact isaacs and request to be made Collaborator, do so :-)

Sadly, for me, AFAIK no such super power exists... 🤷‍♂️ 😄