Welcome to Discussions!

[vito]

Heyo!

We're trying out GitHub's shiny new (beta) "Discussions" feature, which is an alternative to "Issues" that's great for providing support and facilitating open-ended conversations.

In the long term (perhaps short if this goes well) I think it could replace our forums, which could really help de-fragment our community and make it easier to reference issues and PRs.

Cool things it does:

• Discussions can be upvoted, which will make it easier to identify common support questions or just more generally popular discussions.
• Discussions can be started as questions looking for a specific answer, where replies to the discussion can be upvoted and are sorted most-upvotes-first by default. I believe a 'correct' answer can also be chosen.
• Comments can have replies, which should make it easier to carry on side-discussions.
• Issues can be converted to discussions! I'm going to start doing this for anything that sounds more like a localized support issue rather than a bug report.

It'll be interesting to see how we can integrate this tool into our process. I think it would be fantastic if we can keep Issues focused on bug reports and roadmap items.

We could use Discussions to facilitate feature planning and design; in general, we've always preferred starting feature requests as discussions rather than specific proposals, so this would be a great way to represent that. The full flow could be 'Discussions -> RFC (if needed) -> Issue' for feature planning and 'Discussion -> Issue' for bugs which are found in a support request (and of course just a straight Issue for things which are clearly bugs).

If you have any feedback on the Discussions feature itself, you can leave it here and I'll do my best to relay it to GitHub.

Cheers!