Why you must not ask questions on Github issues

INADA Naoki Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 9, 2016

TL;DR

Asking questions on issue tracker may be DoS attack to developers. Use user forum for discussion, if it exists.

Background

Before Github era, many OSS projects had both of issue tracker and forum (BBS or ML). Users discuss on forum and report bugs to issue tracker. Issue tracker was place for issue tracking.

When user ask a question on forum, another users helped him. It breeds “user community”. Asking question is one form of contribute.

But, since Github doesn’t provide forum, many OSS users start asking questions on issue tracker in recent days. At first, small project started mixing issue tracker and forum. And now, there are many users ask questions on issue tracker even if there is link to forum in README.

If developer has enough time and mental energy, and number of users are small enough, there is no problem.

But when developer lacks time or energy, asking question on issue tracker may cause “burn-out”.

Why asking questions on issue tracker cause “burn-out”?

Organizing issue has cost

If important bugs are leaved long time, quality of the project will be worse.

So developers pay significant efforts to organize and triage issues.

And sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between question and real issue by reading only title. That’s why an issue for a question robs time and energy of developer.

Developer : User ratio

If the ratio of developers : expert users : normal or new users is 1 : 10 : 1000,

developers’ time is 1000x important than normal user.

Most of expert user doesn’t check issue tracker often as developers.

When asking a question on issue tracker, developer will reply it even if other users can reply it.

So, asking questions on issue tracker not only robs developers’ time, but also robs chance of growing user community too.

Developers may be not good at English

I’m not good at English. Reading English is far harder than reading Go, Python, and even C code.

There are many OSS developers like me. We use English with significant effort. Replying to easy question may be not easy as you think.

Sometime, I took 10 minutes to read question, 3 minutes to read Python code to reply the question, and 15 minutes to write a response.

(If they tried to read source code, they might get answer sooner, and they could learn more than reading my poor English response!)

After I lost mental energy by private reason, I stopped paying my energy and time to be kind to not malicious easy questions.

What should users do?

When you want to ask a question, keep followings:

Read README carefully

If there is user forum, don’t use issue tracker to ask a question

If there is no user forum, consider StackOverflow.

Pay your own time and effort to solve your problem

Write complete information at first as possible: reproducible code, OS, version, full stacktrace, etc…

FAQ

Q. I don’t know is this a bug or my usage is wrong

A. Until you have confidence it’s a bug, it’s a question, not a bug report.

Ask in forum, and if it seems bug after discussion, file a bug report to

issue tracker with URL and summary of the discussion.

What I want to developers think about

Even if you has enough energy and time for now, setup user forum is good because:

When you’re like to burn-out, you may not have enough energy to start user forum.

Educating OSS users to not use issue tracker as forum may help other OSS developers.

Possible solutions for user forum

Stackoverflow is designed to polish questions and answers. Polished questions and answers are reusable knowledge. If there are many knowledge in the StackOverflow, many users can solve their problem by Googling.

gitter is chat service. Unlike slack, group in gitter is lightweight and bound to Github organization.

Google groups is easy to use ML. But young people don’t like using mail. And it’s not Markdown friendly. So it may be difficult to navigate users to Google groups.

Instead of ML, I propose to create empty Github repository named “project-forum”.

Issue tracker on the repository can be used as forum. People familiar with Github (and Github-flavored Markdown) may love it than Google groups.

Additionally, you can assign some users to organize the repository.