
Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community? - ljw1001
I work on an open source project with a small community. 
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jtablesaw&#x2F;tablesaw<p>I want a place for our users to hold discussions, ask questions, etc, that aren&#x27;t bug reports or feature requests. We&#x27;d be lost at Stack Exchange, as the community is too small. 
I&#x27;m looking for an app like Discourse that is integrated with github. I&#x27;ve used gitter on other projects, and found the endless stream format awkward. What do you use for your projects? The only &#x27;must haves&#x27; are sign-on-with-github-account, and asynch communications.
======
mabynogy
Create a #tablesaw IRC channel and promote it with a kiwiirc link (webchat).

freenode is the home of most software related channels but I prefer Rizon that
I find more benevolent to newcomers.

The channel I'm always on (as example of kiwiirc url):
[https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.rizon.net?channels=#/g/dpt](https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.rizon.net?channels=#/g/dpt)

~~~
eeZah7Ux
The biggest communities are on Freenode and OFTC compared to stuff like slack
& co.

Using FLOSS services that are federated/decentralized or at least run by no
profits is necessary to keep a healthy community.

------
avar
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Google Groups, no it doesn't have any deep
integration with GitHub, but plenty of very active projects hosted on GitHub
and elsewhere use it, and it's a great free forum provider with an easy web UI
for those that want it, and E-Mail for power-users.

Keep in mind that most of the value people get out of such forums is being
able to search possibly years old posts after the fact, and something like
E-Mail is much more likely to be useful in that fashion than some glorified
IRC client.

~~~
erlend_sh
The main thing I really dislike about Google Groups is that it doesn't provide
any reasonable export option.

Disclaimer: I work for Discourse.

------
detaro
> _I 'm looking for an app like Discourse that is integrated with github.
> [...] The only 'must haves' are sign-on-with-github-account, and asynch
> communications._

So, Discourse? It supports OAuth logins, what you need for GH.

~~~
ljw1001
I might go with discourse but I can’t afford the saas version ($100/mo) and
was hoping to avoid having another thing to maintain.

~~~
Leo_Verto
You should be eligible for the 50% non-profit discount and could maybe even
get it for free as an open source project:
[https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-
host...](https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-
community-friendly-github-projects/) (you don't exactly meet the threshold
criteria yet but look at the top comment on that post).

------
politelemon
This can entirely depend on the type of project and how many active
contributors there are - if you have a lot of contributors then you may find
more cross-user communications in which case gitter really does help (they
answer each others' questions). If there are just a few people able to answer
questions or just one (you), then using issues as Q&A would be good enough for
now. The latter is quite common with apps rather than libraries. It is also
more searchable which helps others.

Curious to know, how are you defining small community? I see you have ~100
watchers, ~900 stars, ~200 forks. Are you basing it on that, or some other
criteria (# issues per week etc)

My project - I have a project with roughly same numbers as you. I did set up a
gitter but everyone ignored it and emails me directly or just uses the issues.
Despite not being actual issues, and despite its awkwardness, it's back to
what I said earlier - searchable for people with similar problems in the
future. I'll be sticking to issues until I reach hyper-popularity and then the
gitter may revive itself.

~~~
sanxiyn
I see 19 contributors, which do look small.

~~~
mabynogy
19 is very good. Recruiting active contributors is extremely difficult.

~~~
fundamental
Boy oh boy is that an understatement. One of the ~15 year old ~70kloc projects
I help maintain only has a handful of active contributors at any point. Even
with efforts put into marketing it there's not a large pool of people to pull
from.

I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute to
(in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process.

~~~
mabynogy
> I wish there was a formula for making things more attractive to contribute
> to (in both the short and long term), but it's a fiddly process.

I'm trying to elaborate something for that. On way I see is to reduce the
entry level as much as possible.

I deduce that a project aiming a lot of contributors should be heterogeneous
(contributors can choose their favorite language)and shouldn't have a single
build system (interfaces exists at runtime with a middleware, vms, or files).

~~~
fundamental
That might work or it could backfire. With more build systems and more
languages, then you can easily end up in the category that someone needs to
know all of them to make meaningful changes. If you have people staying in
their own part of the codebase it's easy to imagine significant bitrot
occurring over time.

~~~
mabynogy
I imagine software isolated in vms.

Many people could do the same thing or overlap with someone's else project. It
would allow projects to compete.

~~~
fundamental
Interesting. That's a radically different view on what a project should strive
for than my own. My own FLOSS work focuses on getting work closer to the
system's metal in order to have a responsive low-latency/realtime
configuration (realtime being in the realtime signal processing sense).

In this area in particular people doing the same things results in reasonable
breadth of work, but insufficient depth. So plenty of options, but all of them
not good enough to compete with larger development teams.

~~~
mabynogy
I've seen your website. It's really fascinating.

------
pibefision
I suggest Discourse too. Users can login with their Github account and you can
deploy a small instance very cheaply in Digital Ocean. It's better than a chat
and the content will be indexed in google quickly.

------
lnkmails
We at StackStorm now do a combination of SAAS Discourse
([https://forum.stackstorm.com/](https://forum.stackstorm.com/)) and Slack
(~1200 members). Discourse allows newcomers to search for relevant issues and
allows us to do async support well. With 3000 members in slack, a paid version
would be unimaginable in terms of cost. Plus, even if we pay (which we do for
the team itself), the search is unbelievably bad in slack. Discourse seems to
be doing well for us so far. We'll know more in a few months now. BTW we also
allow people to file bug reports in github. It's a lot of tooling around
customer engagement and support but people like that they can hop on slack,
get pointed to forum if the question they ask cannot be answered by larger
community. Core engineers answer discourse questions and point people to
github issues if there is a legit issue. Sometimes people ask support
questions straight on github.

------
fundamental
A major characteristics that you need to decide upon is how
searchable/disposable are you expecting the conversations to be. Coarsely you
have forums, mailing lists, and chat options. My own open source projects are
split between the different mediums. Chat via something like IRC on freenode
(+ matrix if you want extra features) is easy to setup and great for casual
discussion or very bursty conversation (time-zone permitting). Mailing lists
make for decent multi-day and searchable conversation, but they can pose
signal-vs-noise issues (freelist would be a good option). There are various
options for forums (e.g. discourse) and they work well for longer lived, but
marginally more disposable conversations compared to mailing lists.

As long as you can pick something that the community is interested in using
any option should be reasonably viable.

------
startupflix
Most of the time through [http://gitter.im](http://gitter.im)

~~~
metachris
Gitter for dev communities, for broader communities a lot of projects also use
Slack and Discord, perhaps Rocketchat.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
IRC channels. Accept no substitutes.

------
doshlord
I use [https://gitter.im](https://gitter.im), I think it would be what you're
looking for.

------
Hansi
Would team discussions be an option? [https://help.github.com/articles/about-
team-discussions/](https://help.github.com/articles/about-team-discussions/)

Might mean having to bring people into the project as outside collaborators
though if I read that correctly.

------
ljm
If you’re willing to add people to your org, you can make use of the team
discussions in GitHub itself. It’s like a stripped down forum and is fairly
hidden in the UI, but you can get to it from your org profile (or the team
page for it).

------
sideproject
omg... I released this a few months ago...

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/elseif](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/elseif)

without much fanfare... and I quickly moved onto another project.

~~~
giancarlostoro
That looks really nice and cleaned up, is there a GitHub URL instead? That
post leads to a URL that is down.

~~~
sideproject
A bigger project that I have been working for a long time is HelloBox

[https://www.hellobox.co](https://www.hellobox.co)

~~~
I_complete_me
Any project that dog-foods is a good sign, in my view. Good luck with it.

------
p33p
100% recommend discourse for this. It is what Hugo uses, and I find it very
useful and well laid out.

Example: [https://discourse.gohugo.io/](https://discourse.gohugo.io/)

------
chrisa
I use the free version of slack for [https://github.com/nanohop/sketch-to-
react-native](https://github.com/nanohop/sketch-to-react-native)

I mostly chose it because it was free (despite the 10k message limit - which I
don't see us hitting anytime soon), and people already know how to use it. I
know about the limitations and problems with it - but it was basically the
easiest thing to get started.

------
ketanhwr
Use Reddit! Create a public/private subreddit (whatever suits you). It's a
perfect place for discussions, and you can use IFTTT to provide you with
webhooks.

~~~
anc84
> It's a perfect place for discussions

Reddit is _terrible_ for discussions. It is perfect for current, forgotten-
tomorrow consumation of things.

~~~
jimmies
I used to have a community that was on facebook before. What a terrible
mistake it was. Besides many bad things, it is what you described. There was
no way to search for anything.

Reddit isn't perfect, but it's much less intrusive than facebook and people
can search for past discussions. I know it is a low bar, but then I don't have
to worry about spams, registrations, etc. Plus, if I don't have time to
read/deal with it today, the discussion and the person isn't gone tomorrow
which chat services tend to do.

------
droidist2
There's some new thing called Spectrum that looks really interesting.

[https://spectrum.chat](https://spectrum.chat)

------
thinkingemote
There used to be messaging within GitHub. You could simply message any other
user. Now you have to look at someone's profile to hope to see if they have
some form of contact there.

Im not sure why they removed it - they could have extended this into more
discussion and community space. They say they are social, after all.

~~~
entropie
Keybase has a github integration via browser extension. Not sure how many
people on github actually use keybase, but iam a fan.

------
KajMagnus
Have a look at Talkyard, it's like open source Stack Exchange, + Discourse
topic list, and Slack like chat topics.

[https://www.talkyard.io](https://www.talkyard.io)

Yes there's GitHub login and async communication. (I'm developing it.)

------
gkya
Issues tagged as discussion would work, no? Many projects use the bug tracker
for almost any discussion.

If you would want sth. like a mailing list, there's
[http://librelist.com/](http://librelist.com/) .

~~~
jwilk
I briefly considered Librelist, but their UI is a disaster.

To create or subscribe to list, you... send a message to the list. It's beyond
me why would anyone want it like that.

I ended up using [https://groups.io/](https://groups.io/) for my pet project.

~~~
gkya
Disaster is too heavy of an adjective there. You may not like it. But
interacting with mailing lists using mail is common practice, possible also
with mailman and majordomo, and probably with most other mailing list
software. You should also be a bit nicer when talking about an open source
project hosted for free for everybody.

------
hunvreus
I'm building an OSS thing just for that; simple, built on top of GitHub,
doesn't require any hosting, has Q&A...

Shoot me an email and I should be able to direct you to the repo in the next
week or two.

------
JulienRbrt
Is it not possible to just use GitHub? I mean, by creating a second repo which
would be only for discussion, like tablesaw-support. I have no idea if is it
again their ToS however.

------
samber
Why do you think stack-exchange is not the right place for questions and user
support ?

I'm asking because I am building a tool for tracking mentions on stack-
exchange. I need your opinion. ;)

~~~
ljw1001
I haven’t looked in a while but I don’t believe there was a way to get
notified on a mention. With a small community that would be key

------
edhelas
A little XMPP chatroom, there's plenty of clients out there and there is a
nice native Github integration (to have the PR, commits… notifications) :)

------
estsauver
Gitter looks like what you're looking for.

------
hoofhearted
Trello.

On another note, if i’ve ever seen a startup idea, this has to be one!

~~~
matte_black
There is little money in this.

------
intellix
My favorite is gitter

------
NoCanDo
Like them is my dawgs!

------
TonnyGaric
What about Slack?

~~~
ThatHNGuy
The free plan allows you only to keep the latest 10K messages. And it tends to
be messy

~~~
KajMagnus
And (IMO) it's sooo annoying that everything is hidden behind a login screen.
I usually don't signup, just to see what might be behind.

Here're open source Slack alternatives for public communities, no login
screens: [https://spectrum.chat](https://spectrum.chat) and
[https://www.talkyard.io](https://www.talkyard.io) (I'm developing it).

(Rocket Chat & Mattermost & Zulip are other alternatives, all require login to
see what's there? )

~~~
blocked_again
Many organization and companies don't want outsiders to see what is happening
due to privacy and security issues. Anyway, there is a PR opened for Zulip
which allows people to see the content of public streams without logging in.
It's up to the administrators to decide which streams would be public to users
which are not logged in.

[https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/8135](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/8135)

~~~
KajMagnus
Interesting to know, thanks for mentioning :- ) B.t.w. I like Zulip's threads.

A thought: What if Zulip, during installation, let the admin choose if things
should be public or hidden-behind-login, by default? E.g. useful for open
source projects

~~~
tabbott
We're actually working on something like this in Zulip; it's advertised as
"coming soon" at [http://zulipchat.com/for/open-
source](http://zulipchat.com/for/open-source)

------
yanokwa
We moved the Open Data Kit community from Google Groups to a Discourse forum
at [https://forum.opendatakit.org](https://forum.opendatakit.org) and it's
been awesome. Over the last year, we doubled in size (now up to 7,000 members
and growing) and a lot of that growth has been enabled by Discourse.

We use the forum for exactly what you described, longer conversations that
aren't necessarily tied to a closable issue. And we also use it for all our
support requests. Handling support is great on Discourse because the new topic
interface shows users (a lot of them non-technical) similar questions and it
has great search and SEO.

I think for a small community, Google Groups would work, but my gut says
Google Groups is not long for this world. Also, while mailing lists are
workable for support, but I find them miserable (e.g., you can't move posts
from one topic to another, you can't easily prevent duplication questions).

Anyway, I'd say try Discourse. And if you have any questions about started
with Discourse or using it for open source projects, I'm glad to help! My
handle is "yanokwa" on Gmail and HN and Twitter and GitHub and pretty much
everywhere.

And I guess while I have HN's attention, I can give a quick blurb on Open Data
Kit!

Open Data Kit (ODK) is a set of tools that replace paper forms. Our tools are
mostly used by social good organizations to collect mission-critical data in
difficult environments (e.g., collecting polio vaccination data on 1 million
kids in Mogadishu [1], monitoring elections in emerging democracies [2],
protecting forests in Indonesia [3]).

I love working on ODK because the project has a measurable positive impact on
the world and we have a very kind and welcoming community. As one of the
project founders, I'm a little biased, but if you are looking to get into
open-source software, ODK is a great project to contribute to.

To get started, go to
[http://github.com/opendatakit](http://github.com/opendatakit), find a pinned
repo, read the readme, and claim a "quick win" issue. Oh, and sign up on the
forum [http://forum.opendatakit.org](http://forum.opendatakit.org) and
introduce yourself!

[1] [http://www.emro.who.int/som/somalia-news/somalia-to-
conduct-...](http://www.emro.who.int/som/somalia-news/somalia-to-conduct-
second-round-of-focused-polio-vaccination-activity-in-banadir-and-lower-and-
middle-shabelle-regions.html)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-CGzo3m4PA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-CGzo3m4PA)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7rJCgwV3-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7rJCgwV3-g)

------
wcarss
Would you pay for a service like this if it existed and worked well?

If so, please email me! I'd love to discuss the concept and may have the the
time and inclination to build it if a great answer doesn't already exist.

