Snipe-it: Discourse thoughts?

[snipe]

I'm considering switching to Discourse instead of GH issues and Gitter. If we did that, we would shut down GH issues and Gitter altogether.

The idea would be to better promote a more conversational community, less issue-focused and more discussion based. This feels weird to me - like back in the days when I ran too many web forums - but @uberbrady keeps nagging me about it, so I figured I'd give it a try. There are definitely some aspects I like...

Pros:

• More customizable - we could literally write our own plugins if we needed (and wanted to punish ourselves with Ruby on Rails)
• Options like "Mark as solution" for easier reference
• Saved searches with email alerts
• Polls and voting (this could be super useful with respect to feature requests)
• User reputation for community members that help out a lot
• A more unified place to handle support instead of chat and GH issues
• Ability to promote active members to moderator status
• Repuation system, similar to Stack Overflow
• Could potentially replace our mailing list, and possibly down the line, our pro support helpdesk (using custom groups for customers)

Cons:

• Trickier GH integration. Since topics don't have issue numbers, they can't be closed automagically by commits and pull requests (this is the biggest con for me, personally, for obvious reasons.)
• We lose bountysource integration. (It was broken for a long time anyway)
• Possible spam issues?
• One more ^%$#%ing server to admin

If anyone is interested in kicking the tires and giving feedback, you can find the discourse instance here:

http://discourse.snipeitapp.com

This is only an experiment. Anything posted here COULD go away.

I'd love your thoughts.

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[Mynty100]

Checking this out now :D

[samotelf]

N00b here. Don't know discourse and tbh despite hearing many times about GitHub, this is the only time that I'm a GitHub "customer" because of this wonderful software.
Just replying to let you know that people read this :) one way or another "long live snipe-it"

[SylentBobNJ]

I dig the Discourse idea. I understand the number one con would be an admin overhead-ache, but it may reduce the admin lift of issue tracking by incentivizing users like us to help out more.

Just my $0.02...

[snipe]

but it may reduce the admin lift of issue tracking by incentivizing users like us to help out more

How would that incentivize you, specifically? Just the reputation/badge stuff, or something else?

I'm still pretty torn, to be honest.

Part of the issue for me is that what benefits me directly is the opposite of what makes strong communities. Communities often benefit from the more conversational style of Discourse, where not every issue that gets posted is a feature request or a bug, but might just be cool ideas, interesting workflows, exchanging of ideas on how to meet specific challenges within an org, etc. More threads and replies within a community is a good thing.

For me personally, staying on top of issues (whether they are feature requests or bug reports) is my job, so I look at every post as as task, either to be fixed, implemented or answered+closed - which is why I close issues so aggressively when they are known issues, duplicates, or covered in the Common Issues documentation. More issues in a GH repo, at least at first glance, can seem like a bad thing. So it takes away some of the "to do list" aspects of issues/bugs, which might be great for my mental health over all (no more "open issues" count looming overhead), but makes it less easy to quickly grok what posts are bugs/FR and what's just knowledge exchange that doesn't need my immediate attention. And of course, stuff is going to get misfiled, so I'll have to move threads, etc.

So ultimately, the real question here is - does Snipe-IT need a real community, or is an issue tracker enough to serve our users well? And if it needs a real community, how much additional overhead does that put on the maintainers (cuz we don't have a lot of spare time as it is), and/or can we count on the community to help offset some of that administrative load?

[k2trf]

I'm voting yay simply because it promotes more discussion. Github scares a lot of people away unless they're directly reporting a bug (because despite intentions, github still called it "issues").

Although with the recent buy-out, I also have no faith in GitHub anymore. Honestly, I'm forking a clone and shifting it to GitLab, just as a failsafe so I have something to build from going forward; I have no hope that GitHub will remain open and free.

Remember folks; "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

[Square252]

I'd prefer GitLab, since most people are moving there the community doesn't fragment that much.

Discourse has pretty much the worst UI/UX i've seen in a while.... Even GH is beter imho.

[snipe]

I'm not hopping on the Gitlab train. Github is just fine for source code/PRs, and I think its a pretty huge overstatement to say "most" are moving there. People have strong feelings about Microsoft buying Github, but a whole lot of us are waiting to see what happens.

[k2trf]

I'd agree with that statement; although many are fleeing just because (I've cloned this project over to a GitLab repo as a 'just in case'), it certainly isn't warranted just yet. Sure, have cloned repos as backups, but there's a difference between backup clones and moving development.

Github is still much more mature than GitLab in that context, hands down. M$ may muck with that, but that will have to be seen. Just because they're no friend to FOSS doesn't mean they will inherently flush GitHub down the drain.

EDIT: Though I agree Discourse has the worst UI from a developer perspective, the whole point was to embrace more user feedback/ideas. And from a user's perspective, a cleaner (what we would call uglier, feature-less) UI is better.

[stale[bot]]

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This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Don't take it personally, we just need to keep a handle on things. Thank you for your contributions!

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically closed because it has not had recent activity. If you believe this is still an issue, please confirm that this issue is still happening in the most recent version of Snipe-IT and reply to this thread to re-open it.