Ask HN: Nowadays, is forum service useless for GitHub?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865313

by steveluo9 • 9 years ago

2 3 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I built a forum service for GitHub (https://gitq.com) and launched last week, but have received few feedback so far.

So I'm wondering is forum service useless for GitHub? Do people prefer to use chat service like slack/gitter rather than forum?

Any comments and suggestions are appreciated.

jim_d2• 9 years ago

my 2 cents.

github issues seems to be where most interaction with the community happens. It might be a bit of abuse for their intended purposes but every time I've had a question a github issue usually gets an answer pretty quickly.

What use cases does the forum service fullfil that github issues isn't a 'good enough' solution for?

steveluo9• 9 years ago

I built this because I saw a lot of projects using mailing list as their discussion board, and a lot of projects set up forums themselves, including a lot of famous projects like Atom, React, Vue, even GitHub itself set up a discourse as their forum.

We can't stop a user to use GitHub issues to ask questions, or discuss features, but to me, it is not a good place. So I hope I can build a discussion service for those projects to set up their forum easier when they don't want to use issues as the alternative. But the fact is, may be, just like you said, issues is 'good enough'?

jim_d2• 9 years ago

It makes sense to me that larger projects would use forums, just to make sure you don't pollute issues too heavily.

TBH when I do interact with projects on github I'm mostly interacting with smaller projects and maybe issues are 'good enough' there.

For the larger projects they tend to have better documentation or I can have questions answered on stack overflow, maybe that's why I haven't run into this yet.

I'm wondering if you would have success trying to target projects that are growing rapidly or are in a mid range of popularity. Ideally the product is also giving back to the github repo authors, maybe it's automatically creating an FAQ for them?

I hope some of this helps :)

Ask HN: Nowadays, is forum service useless for GitHub?

Related Stories