Plan switch to recording new feature requests in Issues instead of Discussions/Ideas

[claremacrae]

Update: This has now been completed: Any newly-created feature requests in category "Ideas: Any New Feature Requests go in Issues please" will be labelled as invalid, and users pointed to using the Issues form instead..

Update 26 June 2024: I have converted "Ideas: Any New Feature Requests go in Issues please" to an Announcements channel, to prevent new posts there, to save time for users and maintainers...

I have a long list of reasons why Discussions are far, far less practical than Issues for tracking new feature requests.

• Issues
  • Use templates
  • Putting #1234 in a commit message auto-adds link if the thing is an issue
• Discussions
  • No auto-links to cross-references detected in any discussions - and from from discussions to issues
  • Putting #1234 in a commit message doesn't add link if the thing is a discussion
  • No concept of closing discussions once they are acted on
  • No templates for new discussions
  • Not sure that they can be added to milestones, or two to projects
  • No ability to assign a discussion to self or others

I am spending far, far too much time managing discussions, and manually adding cross-referencing links.

My intention is to, soon:

• add an Issue template for Feature Requests.
• and then start capturing new feature requests
• for each different feature
  • pick one instance of it from Discussion/Idea, and migrate that to Issues
  • mark all the other duplicates in some way to point them to the new issue, and label them as closed in some way
• reach the stage where all existing Discussion/Ideas are locked

Update: It was too time-consuming to convert Discussion/Idea back to Issues... I've left them as-is.

Basically:

• Issues for actionable things
• Discussions for - erm - discussion, Q&A, Show-and-tell

[claremacrae]

Actions:

• Create a template, similar to https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks/blob/main/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/bug-report.yaml -
  • see chore: Add 'Feature Request' issue form #1292
  • see chore: Clearer steps for searching for duplicate issues #1293
• Create a Help section in the docs, with a page on giving feedback, getting help, and sharing nice things
  • Bugs section
  • Feature requests section
  • Q&A section
  • Show & Tell section
• Change "Please submit..." links on front page of docs to point to above new page
• Add a link on the README in root of repo to point to above new page

Later, can start adding FAQ pages, to try and help users find answers to common questions without having to spend their time logging issues or feature requests unnecessarily...

[claremacrae]

Progress report 2022-11-14

The new template for Feature Request Issues has been up for a few days now, and a few people have used it.

A couple of new Discssion/Ideas have been created since then, so as an experiment I have renamed the Ideas section to:
"Ideas: Any New Feature Requests go in Issues please"

I looked at converting it to type Announcements, but got a warning that all existing Ideas posts would be treated as announcements, which didn't seem right.

I did convert one Idea to an Issue, and marked it as Readonly, and labeled with 'status: converted to issue'. But this took time, and the Issue was less informative due to not providing info requested in the template.

[claremacrae]

Now feature requests have been coming in to Issues for a couple of weeks now, and it is helping.

I've decided not to do more work on the documentation right now, so am marking this as released.

[claremacrae]

Picking up #58 (comment)

(Not) converting Discussions Feature Requests to Issues

Next question, Will feature requests currently in Discussions eventually move to the issues and retain their upvote status/count?

I did try converting one, but unfortunately none of the original comments were carried over, and worse, GitHub didn't add a link to the new issue from the discussion. Nor did it lock the original discussion. (Converting issues to discussions - the opposite way - did both those things).

#1319
->
#1320

Oh, and I don't believe their votes were carried across (since Issues do not have built-in votes.)

So currently my conclusion is that it isn't worth spending a huge amount of repetitive time on migrating the remaining discussions to issues.

The downside of this is of course there are two places to search for feature requests. But there always were two places to search, since some feature requests were left in issues anyway.

And that downside is dwarfed by the amount of extra development time available to me now, as a direct result of this move.

Prioritising work

@OogieM, thank you for asking about how to up-vote Issues.

The votes help a bit with planning, and are a way for people to express support without annoying '+1'-type comments. But the votes are not critical or anywhere the main factor to what I choose to spend time on.

I also have a good idea from the time I spend on user support what are the things that will benefit users more.

And also what are the things that will help me spend less time on user support.

The move described in this discussion has saved me hours each week, and yours is the first complaint @OogieM.

There are lots of other factors that affect what I and others will spend our time on, for the benefit of plugin users.

[OogieM]

not complaint so much as confusion :-)

And thanks for the info on why you are not moving the existing discussions into issues.

[claremacrae]

Thanks for being so understanding!

[claremacrae]

I found another advantage of using Issues is that this page on the Hub only searches Issues and not Discussions - so feature requests in Issues are more visible to anyone who may be looking for a plugin to help out:

Plugins seeking help:
https://publish.obsidian.md/hub/01+-+Community/Contributing+to+the+Community/Plugins+seeking+help