Lower barrier of entry for submission

[franky47]

At the moment, submissions are only possible via a fork/PR/merge process, which is cumbersome.

Some ideas to automate submissions:

• GitHub issue, monitor comments with an Action
• Web UI

[peterpeterparker]

I most probably not gonna build a Web UI soon (too many side projects 😉). Of course not against a PR if anyone would jump in.

To the contrary, the "GitHub issue, monitor comments with an Action" sounds like an interesting option and learning.

Thanks for the idea and issue!

[franky47]

Yes, the web UI is probably the option that requires the most work, I'm not a fan either (plus having to deal with captcha, spam etc).

At the end of the day, having static Markdown files for submissions is good. The way I see an integration with comments:

• Have a pinned issue, for example named "Submissions"
• Comments to that issue trigger a GitHub Actions run that:
  • Verifies the formatting and aborts if invalid
  • Pulls information about the user from the GitHub API (can be edited by the user afterwards with a PR)
  • Generates and commits the Markdown file (see "Validation")

Cases not covered:

• Editing the comment (doesn't edit the file)
• Editing the file (doesn't edit the comment)

Validation

Just like you approve submissions via PRs, you'd need a way to approve those as well. I see two ways to do that:

• Liking the comment (👍) triggers the workflow (approve beforehand)
• The workflow runs for all comments, but open a PR rather than landing on main (approve afterwards)

Edit: There does not seem to be a way to detect reactions in comments to trigger Actions runs, so creating PRs might be the only option.

Prior Art

https://github.com/nwtgck/actions-comment-run - (way too much leeway there) https://github.com/peter-evans/create-or-update-comment - (feedback from the action)

[peterpeterparker]

Sounds super cool! I am not the best when it comes to such automation, it's a bit challenging and therefore interesting 😉. Being said, here too open to contributions.

[franky47]

I've got a basic proof of concept in franky47/actions-laboratory:

1. The workflow listens for issue comments
2. An example comment was posted
3. The Actions run generated a Pull Request
4. Which created a file with the contents of the comment

Todo:

• Lock workflow to a specific issue number
• Add validation to avoid spam
• Test comment edition with PR update
• Escape backticks to handle code blocks (not critical in this application though)

As a side-note, I'm definitely going to write about how this hack can make blog posts easier. 😀

[peterpeterparker]

Wow that's such a cool hack 🔥

[franky47]

This is seriously cool. It can also show the action progress/status using reactions on the original comment:

[peterpeterparker]

Hahaha c'que c'est bien!