A Place For Discussions

[lorepirri]

We were discussing briefly with @Paul7Peterson and @ericbolikowski about my proposal to store our longer discussions here instead of leaving them on Slack.

By longer discussions I mean those chats that start with a nice message and start a nice conversation. When you smell that, it's a good candidate. There is so much value in those conversations.

Even on slack on payed tier, one has to search for something to find a discussion in the history. By experience it's useless.

Async communication practice suggest not to save more than a few days of chat messages. I agree.

A topic might arise after months, with added ideas or comments, and w/ slack/discord, one would write those in a chat, without any memory, or reference to the previous conversation.

That is my main pain point. Personal of course.

As far as I saw, Discord is a chat system a bit more complex than slack, but still, messages get lost in history, among other messages, channels, DM, and the rest.

For discussions strictly related to a repo, that are meant to be upgraded to documentation, an article, or a Story (issue), I find GitHub Discussions a bit more embedded and cleaner to use.

Pros:

1. It's markdown.
2. One can refer code from the repo (as in the issues/comments).
3. People from the team can comment, and one can mention people.
4. It supports animated GIFs, and now mp4. The discussion is visible and accessible by the team.
5. Each topic stays there.
6. It's not an Issue, so it does not crowd the issues tracker.
7. As a matter of fact, if an Issue has a fat description, it could be converted to a Discussion.
8. One can refer to a discussion with a link, in an issue, in a conversation on other means (like in slack).
9. Having the whole conversation in one place, makes it easy to convert it to a blog post, documentation, several issues or stories.

Cons:

1. It's not great for collaborative writing, true. For that it's better gdoc.
2. Belongs to the public repo, therefore it is public.

What do you think? It's only a proposal. I won't stress you about this :)

[ericbolikowski]

Yalla, let's do it! I've been meaning to use GH Discussions for a while, and with you two (@Paul7Peterson @lorepirri) seeming keen as well there's nothing stopping us.

The biggest pro for me is simple: we use a great feature in an existing tool instead of adding yet another tool. Fewer tools = better DX.