GitHub has a new Discussions feature, which you can see in action here. I’m trying to figure out whether to use Discourse for my software development community or go with the GitHub feature. Has anyone evaluated the differences?
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I liked the new Github discussions because sometimes the issue tracker is not focused in support, and some teams says to open a discussion ticket somewhere else (that might require a new account, and may be difficult to track if the support ticket is just an email).
The discussion make it an ideal place for discussions about the repository, especially support (after all, if you would create an issue, you would be already logged in Github, redirecting to the discussion makes the creation of support tickets trivial).
That said, it’s not as feature rich as Discourse, actually what you can do there is very limited and if what you want is a real forum I would recommend Discourse. In Discourse you can have themes, plugins, a great search mechanism, moderators have much more control over topics and posts, you also have the trust level system, timeline in topics, bookmarks with reminders, several ways to receive notifications about topics and posts (for example, I specified to receive notifications about topic creations in the category announcement, releases, and praise -> comparison, that’s how I was notified and I visited this topic) and several features and customizations that you don’t have in Github Discussions.
Furthermore, it’s hard to track new posts in the discussions due to it’s threaded format (sometimes the notification doesn’t take you to the post that triggered it, or even if it leads you there, if there was more than 1 new post in different threads of the discussion, you will lose them, unless you search each thread, because they are not sequential).
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I think they have just started making this functionality. If I understood correctly, then at the very bottom is the solved answer: https://github.com/vercel/vercel/discussions/5016
Perhaps soon they will raise him to the first place. I don’t think they want to create a forum for discussion. Q&A service? Then might have to follow the path of Stack Overflow. To remove, for example, noise in the comments, why is it needed there?
It’s interesting to see what they are planning. Thank you.
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