Better workflow to deal with your Issues

[HonkingGoose]

Hi Squidfunk! 👋

Your current workflow

1. Incoming feature request Issues are closed after triage, but tracked in the backlog.
2. Reopen Issue when starting work on it.

Why your current workflow is confusing

You, and your users, must go to the backlog project page to see the "real status" of the Issues.

Closing "still to be worked on Issues" is confusing, because usually closed Issues are done or closed as "won't do".

Better workflow idea

Outsiders create Discussions, and you + team create actionable Issues.

In more detail:

1. Update your Issue template, and redirect "outsiders" to create a Discussion.
2. Triage incoming Discussions. Figure out scope, and decide do or won't do.
3. If you want to work on the feature: create a new Issue, with the relevant info, todos, and so on.
4. Keep the cleaned-up Issues open.
5. Optional: add labels to the repository: backlog and in-progress.
6. Optional: assign Issue to person who is going to work on it.
7. Close open Issue automatically by using the Fixes #issue-number pattern in the PR-body text.

Why this is better

• You are in control of the content of the Issue.
• The Issue only has info you need, no extra discussion or confusing threads.
• Issues are kept open, and closed when done, or closed as "won't do".
• PRs closes the linked Issue. This means you can see later which PR closed the issue.
• Optional status labels, so you can see the status directly on the Issues page.

Over at the Renovate project we use this pattern to deal with the flood. We really like this pattern as maintainers. 😄

Beware of difficult users

A warning: some users get angry when they can't make an Issue, and complain loudly. We had some bad interactions with users over this workflow. 😞

The workflow is great! But I want you to know this possible bad thing ahead of time. 🙃

I can help with the new workflow

If you agree with my ideas, I can make a new Issue template for you to direct your users to create a Discussion. I'll also help you understand and use the new workflow. 😉

[squidfunk]

Thanks for suggesting! Interestingly, there has not been a single complaint about our new approach. It allows us to focus the issue tracker on bugs rather than feature requests, the latter of which sometimes exist for a long time (like live preview), which cannot yet be worked on before we make progress on some topics we're looking into as part of the foundational work we're at. Thus, those issues added to the total number of open issues for a long time, diluting the value of the issue tracker providing a quick view on whether this project is actively maintained and a good fit. Personally, when I look at a project, hundreds of open issues are a red flag.

However, after investing more than 5,000 hours (me and my teammates) over the last 15 months, I'm very happy to say that we're very close to finishing a first alpha release of our foundational work, which will also include several organizational as well as project-related changes. One important part of this is that we'll move to a much more transparent and collaborative development approach, as well as an open roadmap that we'll prioritize according to the needs of our users. The backlogged feature requests will be integrated into the bigger picture roadmap, which makes more sense than just looking at them without context.

We're working hard on making it happen in September ☺️

[HonkingGoose]

Thank you for the in-depth response! 😄