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Comment by fourthark | Hacker News Reader

"Please ask support questions on Stack Overflow or the users group. I am closing this."

I would be okay with these responses if it was remotely apparent whether Issues acts as a discussion forum or not. It varies for every project unfortunately. For smaller projects, the risk of asking on SO is the maintainer, and anyone else familiar with the project, will never see it as they wouldn't be actively monitoring it.

Hopefully Github's current blast of Issues updates will make it easier for project owners to explain their respective policy on this.

This is where CONTRIBUTING.md comes in. If a project doesn't want Issues to be used for support, then it should mention it there. Whether people actually read it is another story :(

Yeah this is actually my canned response on one of my own projects, and I'm tired of copying and pasting it. Nobody reads CONTRIBUTING.md

In our issues template, we start it with:

"GitHub issues are for bugs / installation problems / feature requests. For general support from the community, see [StackOverflow](link)"

However, we still get plenty of issues filed that are more appropriate for StackOverflow, so not sure there's anything technical you can do without integrating more closely with StackOverflow :)

It's not at all logical to look into the guidelines for contributing to a project of what you seek is support, not to contribute a feature request or a patch. I'd never look there.

Maybe integrating issues search with SO would be a good idea?

Personally, I create an issue if I strongly believe that it is a bug in the project or I want to suggest some improvements (e.g. found some strongly outdated docstrings) and head to SO if I believe that it's me doing something wrong.

But I can easily see how the distinction is very subjective and blurry.

Love those cold, corporate, canned responses? Does Level 1 tech. support make your day by asking if you've rebooted? These features and more, can all be yours!

Well, I try to at least drop a hint as to the right search terms when I do this, and an encouraging word. But IMO your issue is not my issue. I am not going to track your issue.

But if I have time I might try to point you in the right direction, in the right forum.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8

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