In the time since this repository was created, GitHub has changed, a lot. The perception of GitHub's attitude back when this repository was created was one of "We know best, do it the GitHub way, if it doesn't work for you, you're doing it wrong." (This was likely not a principled choice by GitHub, but they were a new startup with way too much to do, and managing feedback is hard.)

Since then, GitHub has grown, going through multiple metamorphoses, most notably in their approach to feedback. They even hired me, one of their most annoying users, who never shuts up and even created a repo just to track all his annoying complaints :) It's quite fun playing the resident "grumpy lazy OSS dev" in product meetings these days.

When I started at GitHub last year, I was inundated with emails from threads in internal GitHub repos mentioning issues on this tracker. JS devs at the company may know me as "isaacs from npm", but quite a few hubbers have greeted me as "wait, you're the isaacs?? from the feedback repo!?" Which is kind of weird, since I haven't been very active here in a long time. The main things that got me started with this (issues being broken and useless on active projects, no project management, no way to lock issues that get out of control, PRs without any way to do code reviews or provide feedback, completely opaque CI integrations, the list went on) all got fixed, and I sort of moved on.

Suffice to say, the attitude towards feedback has changed significantly in the last decade, and now the challenge is how to make the most of it, and efficiently get things done and know what will have the biggest impact on our userbase.

I don't know exactly what that will look like, but @michellemerrill is going to take inventory of the items here, and the other myriad ways that we send feedback to GitHub, make a plan, and share it with us.

This repo has value, and no one wants to lose the value it provides. That said, one of my earliest complaints (and part of the reason for creating this channel!) was that feedback to GitHub tends to be fragmented, and so it's hard to know what pieces of feedback are being accepted, what are rejected, etc. From the other side, trying to make informed product decisions, that fragmentation can be even more challenging. Right now, this repo being external is somewhat contributing to that problem. So I can only imagine that incorporating these things into a coherent story will improve things for GitHub development teams and all GitHub users.

I'll keep this issue open for bit for anyone who wants to weigh in on it, but thought it was best to just let y'all know that this forum will grow into something newer and better fairly soon, so you're not shocked when it starts happening.

I'm extremely grateful to all the users who participated here in good faith, and helped moderate and organize these issues, and I hope that this machine can keep running even better, with more impact to guide GitHub towards doing the right thing for their users. I know that the product teams at GitHub have benefitted, and appreciate it as well.