
Ask HN: Nowadays, is forum service useless for GitHub? - steveluo9
I built a forum service for GitHub (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitq.com) and launched last week, but have received few feedback so far.<p>So I&#x27;m wondering is forum service useless for GitHub? Do people prefer to use chat service like slack&#x2F;gitter rather than forum?<p>Any comments and suggestions are appreciated.
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jim_d
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?

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steveluo9
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_d
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 :)

