Links to discussions don't work

[martinjagodic]

I get notifications for issues, pull requests, and discussions in Gitify, but only issues and PRs are clickable. To see the discussion I have to open each repo individually and navigate there, so a clickable discussion notification would do wonders.

[codebytere]

@martinjagodic the issue lies unfortunately with GitHub - the Notifications API is somewhat......lacking in many areas. The payload for a call to fetch notifications for an authed user has a subject property:

   "subject": {
      "title": "Greetings",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octokit/octokit.rb/issues/123",
      "latest_comment_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octokit/octokit.rb/issues/comments/123",
      "type": "Issue"
    },

and for Discussions, subject.url is always null because it seems that the backend is not filling it properly for newer notification types like Discussions. There's https://github.com/manosim/gitify/pull/487 up to try to triage this but it'll only really be fixed once the GitHub API team figures it out.

[bmulholland]

Is there anywhere to +1 the issue with Github?

[jamesdh]

@bmulholland easiest thing is to probably go to https://support.github.com and open a new issue there. I've had pretty good success with getting the attention of their engineers through that channel. Unfortunately I don't believe they offer any way to make your support ticket public (for upvotes).

[bmulholland]

I finally got bothered enough to look to file a ticket with Github, and I got routed to their Discussions where they gather feedback. https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/categories/discussions-feedback?discussions_q=notifications+api+url+category%3A%22Discussions+Feedback%22

I've created a discussion item for this, please go +1 it: https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/15252

[jamesdh]

You'll probably have the most luck going to https://support.github.com, clicking "My Tickets", and then filing a new ticket there. That should actually be received by an engineer. As opposed to their more public facing community platforms which, from my experience, are not monitored by their engineering teams and instead have community moderators who do a terrible job of bubbling up issues appropriately.

I've used their lesser known support system numerous times and have gotten responses directly from engineers at GitHub almost every time.

[bmulholland]

Thanks! Done.

[jamesdh]

Just realized I left basically the same comment ~5 months ago 🤦🏻‍♂️

[bmulholland]

Though now at least there's something to +1, even if it's not a support ticket and may not get seen by an engineer

[bmulholland]

Here's what I got back from Github support -- something doesn't line up, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to connect the dots. Obviously there is some support for Discussions, since they show up in the notifications. Anyway, it's hard for me to move this forward without investing significantly more time.

Discussions are not currently available via our REST API so there isn't anywhere for the url field to point to at the moment. I'm sorry not to have better news for you!

There is an open internal issue tracking this as a feature request and I have added your +1 to the list. At the point when discussions are available to REST API, you'd be able to make use of those notifications, but I don't have an ETA on when that will happen. I'd suggest keeping an eye on our changelog and blog where we make announcements on new features.

[Dentrax]

Kindly ping here 🤞

cc @manosim

[bmulholland]

@Dentrax In the OSS world, pinging people is considered rude. There's no relationship here where anyone owes us anything.

[Dentrax]

Thanks for the warning, I'm already aware of that behavior.

In the OSS world, pinging people is considered rude.

It's a subjective statement. "rude" is a way too strong word. Anyone can ping me anytime, anywhere; I don't mind, always ready to help. I would even drop a small thank for reminding. So, I don't see any "rude" behavior here.

Since more than 8 months passed and no update on this (+ no stale bot impl on this repo), people may have forgotten. Let's focus on the problem and alternative solutions, or kindly ignore the "ping".

[jamesdh]

The greater issue at hand currently is that this repo/project is effectively abandoned. I think going forward, the only way for issues like this one to be fixed is for someone to fork it and take matters into their own hands. For whatever reason, the creators/collaborators of this repo seem to have lost all interest in it and aren't willing to assign others to help out.

More specific to this issue, there is a fix (using the GraphQL API) and a workaround (simply forwarding to the Repo's Discussions page) already PR'd, but again, without anyone willing to review/merge/release, they aren't much help currently.

[bmulholland]

See https://github.com/manosim/gitify/issues/545