Do we want to use any of the newer GitHub features here?

[pradyunsg]

This is basically a question to folks who've been doing the thankless work of issue tracker triage here.

There's basically two potential things, that might be useful here:

• Discussions. Ability to mark correct answers, threading but open-ended kinda like Discourse (no templates).
• Issue Forms. (alpha feature, that's invite only) Additional structure and constraints when filing issues. Still shows up on the issue tracker.

You can see how they both look on https://github.com/pradyunsg/furo (there's an issue form, and there's discussions enabled too)!

[henryiii]

Discussions

I'm not sure this would help much; maybe a little if you could get users to search the discussions first, but I think the average user is usually new to GitHub too, and often types the question in the title box, does not ever acknowledge/respond/close, etc, so this wouldn't really help much (in this special case, normally I like Discussions).

Issue Forms

This looks interesting, though in general, users do a pretty good job of filling out the current template. Things they struggle with are adding fenced code blocks (and the above mentioned title issue), might help somewhat, but probably not much. Worth a try, but likely not transformative. Now if there was a way to automatically surface information based on the entry before submission, perhaps...

One idea along these lines, what about adding a stale issue bot? Say after 6 months a stale warning is added, and 7 months they get closed. That would help find issues in the 170+ backlog that still have people who care about them, and is less work and less potentially negatively viewed than having someone (@layday, currently) go close them manually. There could be a tag that keeps key issues open, and of course, users can comment once every 6 months to keep them open too. Would be easy to add with https://github.com/actions/stale - I could do that if everyone likes that idea.

[merwok]

Feedback on using bugs (github issues):

• titles are mostly not changed so unhelpful to see in a list and impossible to search for
• many people don’t answer questions, or don’t explain their problem
  • could be that pre-filled text is weird, the same text box is asking questions and supposed to hold your replies
• many people don’t come back to the ticket after a reply (even when repling shortly after ticket is created)
• the same problem can cause many similar reports

My opinion is that this github tracker does not create a forum where people see each other’s messages and try to help each other, it’s a series of individual support requests that a few people try to answer. Everything is manual, duplicated and in great part fruitless. For some people it works, we clarify misunderstanding of modules or setuptools, sometimes we find a mistake in docs that get fixed for everyone, but I’m not sure of the success rate here.

[henryiii]

Issue forms might help with issues like #485 . :)

I do think we improve the docs based on common misunderstandings here, or the error messages (such as the message setuptools gives if setup.py is completely empty), so that's a clear benefit of the issues - even if Discussions worked (which for this type of user + problem, I don't think they would), it would hide repeated requests, which tell us something needs to be fixed in docs or error messages.

Does anyone have an opinion on the stale issues idea?

[henryiii]

I think our default form should also add a label, so that we can tell issues like this one from the "help me" issues that fill out the form. Usually the title is untouched, though not always (and sometimes the title is where they type their problem).