officially track GitHub issues publicly

[chadwhitacre]

Sent the following to support@github.com:

Greetings,

First, please allow me to apologize. I pulled a stunt today where I created a "github.com" repo and added all members of the GitHub organization on GitHub as collaborators. It was wrong of me to spam you all, and I apologize.

The context for my mistake was a conversation I was having with @holman and others on Twitter, and I was hoping we could pick up that conversation here on support@github.com. I'm given to understand that this email channel is Very Important to the way GitHub functions, and is backed by a finely-tuned internal application (maybe this?).

What I'm struggling with is the mismatch between how support works for open-source projects and how support works for GitHub itself. I don't like emailing support@ with issues because it's not public. I can't point other people to the conversation, I can't find out who else shares my problems, and I can't find out how others work around them. It's just not social.

Tweeting @githubhelp is public and social but it isn't a good tool for anything more than the simplest issues.

I learned today of another unofficial GitHub repo, isaacs/github, that is a month older than mine and has 50+ issues in it. I've nipped mine in the bud and started filing issues there instead.

One thought that occurs to me is that maybe an email bridge could be written that proxies messages back and forth between isaacs/github and support@github.com. A hack, and after my misfire this afternoon I'd better not move forward on it without your approval.

What's the state of the internal conversation around this issue? What can I do to help?

chad

Chad Whitacre, Founder, Gittip
https://www.gittip.com/
https://twitter.com/whit537
chad@zetaweb.com
+1-412-925-4220 (cell)

[tjfontaine]

perhaps we should mark this as a dup of #6

[tjfontaine]

Here's hoping that we can get some movement from github on these issues.

[chadwhitacre]

Done. :)