Locking GitHub Conversations

https://github.com/blog/1847-locking-conversations

by jodal • 12 years ago

54 21 12 years ago

vhost-• 12 years ago

I wonder how much this is going to be abused. There are a lot of angry BDFLs out there and I can see this being used to silence people.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

I don't think locking a thread is going to do harm.

If I don't want you to participate in my issue tracking, I can choose to ignore you, or now I can choose to lock the issue. You either continue to request attention from me, or won't come back to my software.

This can happen before locking is brought to us by Github, but this feature can help reduce noises. There are people who follow the repo and actually get spams from following repos they like to keep an eye on.

You have your choice to write about someone's angry ignorance on your blog or hackernews and people just won't care. They can even hide the repo or delete the repo once and for all.

Is this a good way to deal with people publicly? Yes to some, no to many. It's a choice. You either opt-in or opt-out.

jipiboily2• 12 years ago

Finally, no more :+1:s when it's all that is being said by everyone, without much discussions...yay to less noise!

TimWolla• 12 years ago

I must admit that I like those :+1:s, it shows which issues should be prioritized.

teeray• 12 years ago

Yeah, but it's symptomatic of needing voting for issue priority. Comments aren't the place for indicating you'd like something to be fixed.

tjohns• 12 years ago

As a maintainer, the +1s get very annoying and can actually get in the way of useful work being done.

At best it makes the comment thread hard to follow. At worst, it causes some people to start filtering their bugmail to /dev/null.

This is why some issue trackers have a dedicated voting system. Even then, people will still ignore it and reply with "+1" or "me too". sigh

acdha• 12 years ago

https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/256 is exhibit A for why this is a waste of time. The maintainer says it's a priority, they're working on it, etc. and there's another couple hundred comments from people who aren't helping out but are willing to distract the maintainer with a +1.

jipiboily2• 12 years ago

Two things here: - the +1s show some level of interest, but enough to dive in the code, so it's half interesting, and half useless - also, once you've reached a certain number of +1s....well, it's just noise and annoying. 50 +1...500+1...

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

Finally.

Now all we need is the ability to vote up an issue and we're set. Seems comments have been used as a voting mechanism on Github since its inception and this new feature could put a stop to that. I hope not.

steveklabnik4• 12 years ago

This was there long ago, and was removed.

bhousel• 12 years ago

Any idea why? It seems like it would be such a useful feature.

sloanesturz• 12 years ago

Hopefully this feature will help to mitigate political PR's like this one so that project leaders can get back to writing code and won't have to deal with their repos being overloaded by non-contributor talking heads. 742 comments over a simple terminology change? Yeesh.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801646

gnoway• 12 years ago

I guess this was downvoted for the unnecessary sarcasm, but the linked thread was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this new github feature. A lot of unfortunate ignorance and anger-in-response could have been avoided (or at least diverted from github) had this feature been in place at the time.

RKoutnik• 12 years ago

EDIT: Looks like this has been fixed already. Speedy update by GitHub, nice work folks.

This is very easy to bypass. I was able to 'chime in' on one of the massive threads this feature intends to stop by referencing it in an issue on one of my repositories:

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-45544...

Obviously this is a tad more complicated than before (and makes it much harder to go on multi-paragraph rants) but the trolls can still troll.

holman2• 12 years ago

Yeah; that's a pretty limited interaction (compared to comments) so it wasn't a huge focus yet. I'll have a fix patched up and deployed in the next hour or so, though.

(Edit: fix is deployed.)

Fishrock123• 12 years ago

This also needs to be available for commit threads, I think.

See: https://twitter.com/Fishrock123/status/476133688506609664

Locking GitHub Conversations

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