Today, the most unkempt portion of our community is the way we manage issues in our community. For context, we run a product-led community of users of products built by our company. Issues of course could mean bugs, feature requests, or general issues—just like a GitHub issue, really. Issues across many different vectors, such as:
- GitHub issues for code/tools that we (my team) also owns
- GitHub issues for our open-source marketplace (50+ and growing repos/topics)
- General issues/feedback/bugs submitted about our product
- Issues within the community itself (community feature requests, etc.)
- Internal issues that get submitted to our team by other business units (today they send these in Slack)
- Documentation issues
Below are just some of my current, unorganized thoughts on managing this, but I thought I’d see what others are doing in their communities in the meantime. So, how do you do it?
- Part of this equation is your classic, forever struggle of categories vs tags in terms of general organization
- Users are generally overwhelmed with the number of possible tags, may not inherently know which tag to search for, or in most cases don’t even attempt to put a tag. (and requiring n tags typically forces them to put minimum effort into a tag)
- An overarching submission form could help alleviate the submission process for this, assuming you went with more than 1-2 categories.
- A powerful feature Discourse could add would be to tie tags to required dropdown fields in the experimental form templates. This way, for example, if the dropdown question is, “Which browser are you using?” there would be discourse tags associated with the answers Chrome, Arc, etc.
- One of my biggest issues for this is an “administrative view” of this solution. I believe the tickets plugin (although the screenshots are broken, so I can’t refresh my memory) may be a good use case for this.
- I’d really need to act on a lot of metadata about the topic in this regard. Submission date, current status, associated tags, assignee(s), ability to close them, etc.
