
GitHub: You've been asking for it. You know the issue(s). Delete 'em - cloakedarbiter
https://twitter.com/github/status/1060233780114288640
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Avamander
I see a lot of potential for abuse. Maintainers should _not_ have the power to
make everything they don't like disappear. Neither do I see what this feature
tries to solve that say filtering out closed issues with `invalid` tag
doesn't.

~~~
halfastack
Well... As a maintainer of multiple repos:

a) If you don't trust the maintainer, the project is already dead.

b) If the maintainer is power hungry, you're already screwed.

Sometimes, we seek for programmatic solutions where trust should be employed.
If you can't trust the maintainer, just forget about the project, regardless
of whether maintainer can delete issues or not. I mean, we can already force
push to delete history, for example.

~~~
craftyguy
> a) If you don't trust the maintainer, the project is already dead.

I feel like this argument doesn't really address the problem that non-delete-
able issues helps to address. You may trust a maintainer right up until they
do something that causes you to distrust them. This takes away your ability to
continuously audit the maintainer and takes away data points which may cause
you to suddenly distrust them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> This takes away your ability to continuously audit the maintainer and takes
> away data points which may cause you to suddenly distrust them.

The platform is not built for you as a free consumer to audit projects and
ensure compliance with your own criteria. You would need to build you own
tooling for that, and one might argue that is out of scope for Github to
build. moosingin3space addresses this well further upthread.

~~~
craftyguy
> The platform is not built for you as a free consumer to audit projects and
> ensure compliance with your own criteria.

Meh. Of course it is not built for that, however it did provide a public
record of sorts that could be used for that purpose. I don't think gitwhatever
should be in the business of helping folks audit projects for personal
criteria compliance, but I do see this change as having a negative impact on
users' ability to collect information about developers/maintainers to make
that decision.

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MitchellCash
I can see use cases for a delete function, but as people mention it’s all
about how you manage abuse.

If a project owner really wanted they could just delete the whole repo (which
includes issues et all) with no warning or confirmation from collaborators.
But that’s a larger more destructive move, whereas, deleting a politically
fuelled issue can be abused with far less repercussion.

Not on an issue, but I did once have a moment where I could have used a delete
function on a pull request. I merged a pull request with my personal account
on a repository I had only been working on under a pseudonym. From memory even
resetting to an earlier commit and re-merging again with the correct identity
didn’t work as GitHub kept a record of the original merge on that pull
request. Which only further tied my two identities together as I tried to
correct the mistake.

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johnsonjo
This seems good. I once saw a very cringey question asked on a transgender
developer’s Ask me Anything (AMA) repo that was totally inappropriate
harassment. It made me feel bad that they couldn’t delete the issue.

~~~
louiz
Using github's issues as a question forum is probably a great misuse...

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bostonvaulter2
I hope you can see the list of deleted issue #'s, not the content, but just
enough to get a feel for if there is an unnecessarily large amount of issue
deletion going on.

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hitekker
Passive-aggressive and coercive maintainers will almost certainly abuse this
power.

My uninformed guess is that enterprise users asked for this feature for their
own repos and it was eventually cargo-culted into the OSS side.

More reason to use Gitlab, I suppose.

~~~
halfastack
No passive-aggressive and coercive maintainers on Gitlab? Huh! a three-letter
change will save your projects it seems :)

~~~
ivanfon
I think they meant that you can’t delete issues on Gitlab, not a comment on
the quality of maintainers on Gitlab as opposed to Github.

It seems like you can actually delete issues on GL, but only project owners:
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/deleting_issu...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/deleting_issues.html)

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Waterluvian
Super valuable for private orgs!

