

Locking GitHub Conversations - jodal
https://github.com/blog/1847-locking-conversations

======
RKoutnik
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...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-45544199)

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.

~~~
holman
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.)

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

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

~~~
tjohns
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_

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vhost-
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
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.

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sloanesturz
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801646)

~~~
gnoway
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.

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Fishrock123
This also needs to be available for commit threads, I think.

See:
[https://twitter.com/Fishrock123/status/476133688506609664](https://twitter.com/Fishrock123/status/476133688506609664)

------
DigitalSea
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.

~~~
steveklabnik
This was there long ago, and was removed.

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

~~~
steveklabnik
As a maintainer, I never found it particularly useful. Open source projects
aren't generally democracies, and clicking an 'upvote' button is so low-effort
that it wasn't really a good signal anyway.

~~~
plorkyeran
My experience with it on trac and uservoice is that it's an easy way to filter
out things that exactly one person cares about, and not much more. The main
benefit is that it reduces the number of spammy +1 comments you get.

~~~
holman
@steveklabnik (since hn won't let us nest further): why not just hit the
subscribe button on the right?

~~~
steveklabnik
> (since hn won't let us nest further)

ProTip(tm): HN does this when you try to reply too fast. You can click 'link'
to get around it, though. :)

I never saw that! Thanks. Somehow that just escaped my vision.

