Just Say No

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • uBlock

    uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

    I prefer https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues solution where issue creation is simply blocked

    In this case users directed to garbage dump issue tracker but it also can be skipped.

    Main problem with stalebot is wasting time on proper issue which is then closed without ever being read by human.

    Maybe compare it to place offering users to fill poll or write feedback form? And then dumping them straight into paper shredder?

    Maybe simply do not encourage users to fill feedback forms if you will shred all of them anyway?

  • dear-github

    :incoming_envelope: An open letter to GitHub from the maintainers of open source projects

    > don't let people waste their time creating issues in the first place

    But then you don't get to use issues to track things that you personally care about. It would be nice if there were a way to enable issue creation by the repo owner / maintainers, but disallow it for the public at large. Especially now that "discussions" are a thing, which gives a place for people to comment without implicitly requesting work from the maintainer.

    Apparently this is sort of possible[1] by setting `blank_issues_enabled: false`, so that you can only create issues from the Project page.

    [1]: https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/293#issuec...

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • PdfPig

    Read and extract text and other content from PDFs in C# (port of PDFBox)

    Maybe (most likely) this is a problem of GitHub's terminology. For genuine bugs, e.g. here's the repro, the stack trace, the code to replicate it, it happens 100% of the time if you follow these steps, I'd agree that just having it open and in the backlog would be preferable.

    The problem is those make up maybe at a generous estimate, 10-15% of issues in a projects backlog. In the interests of full disclosure here's mine (I don't use stalebot) https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aissu.... As you can see from the backlog I close almost nothing. This was a deliberate choice to avoid closing things until the fix was confirmed by the reporter.

    But equally that's the first time I've opened the repository in a couple of months and the amount of angst and dread I feel just from the size of that list means I'll probably find yet another excuse not to do anything on it this coming month.

    Discussions on this topic feel a lot like "technical solutions to social problems"; by which I mean "well in the ideal world a perfectly logical person would do x, y, z so the system should reflect that". And while a stalebot is the archetypal technical solution to a social problem it at least works with how maintainers work. Sometimes in life you want to ignore a problem and have it go away. When you can't do that, e.g. government bureaucracy, work stuff, social obligations, that's where stress comes from. And asking volunteer maintainers to add a whole new source of stress in their life falls apart when people get busy, or their life circumstances change, or they get ill or tired or whatever.

    Yes, in a perfect world the issue backlog would be sacrosanct and perfectly groomed/prioritized. But we're just fleshy sacks of chemicals and we're not perfect. Unrealistic expectations from users are the cause of maintainer burnout.

    Because GitHub closed issues are still viewable and searchable (I'd guess most people search it through a search engine not the terrible inbuilt search) I'd disagree that they're deceiving users somehow.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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