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> I've noticed there was a strong push around 2016-2018 to recommend newbie programmers NOT to go to Stackoverflow, but instead to ask the questions straight in the Github issues. Turns out, the problem was low quality questions all along, and that just converted an issue that StackOverflow had solved long ago into burnout for open source developers on Github.

I would contend that Stack Overflow hasn't solved it. The "close poor questions" and "why are there so many people who don't search first?"

As users felt that their questions weren't answered as promptly enough on SO or that closing their questions was equivalent to gatekeeping. This lead many of the people frustrated with not getting support type questions answered on Stack Overflow to go to other places to ask those support type questions. As the tooling around GitHub issues as support has been poor (and the number of people asking questions far outstrips the number of people offering support), this is leading to burnout.

This is very much a "push it over there" problem. There's been a good bit of history of companies and libraries trying to make Stack Overflow their support site ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=reach+out+is%3Aq )

> Github needs to step up their game and give authors more powerful tools, there's so many entitled developers out there that will come and demand changes. It might make new devs feel less welcome, but the balance is tipped way too much to allow anyone to create massive spam for projects right now.

Absolutely - though that only delays the problem until the entitled developers overwhelm that tooling.

I sometimes fantasize about disabling Issues for one of my more popular GitHub repos, but since I also have a disturbing number of users who find my email from early git logs and send me emails like "why didn't you respond to me on github", I keep them open in the hopes that it prevents more people from doing the same.

That being said, I'd pay good money to never have to see another person submit another "bug" report where they remove all contents from the bug template I created and just write "why doesn't X do Y. plz fix" followed by an "any updates?" comment <24 hours later.

I wouldn't say the whole thing has necessarily led to burnout, since I still enjoy working on the project, but it has led to me never logging into GitHub and turning off all notifications.

> That being said, I'd pay good money to never have to see another person submit another "bug" report where they remove all contents from the bug template I created and just write "why doesn't X do Y. plz fix" followed by an "any updates?" comment <24 hours later.

There are GitHub bots for that. The one I’ve seen (I forget the name) comments afterwards if the template isn’t followed. Perhaps it even allows you to directly close and lock the issue in those situations.

Alternatively, if you’d truly “pay good money” it shouldn’t be hard to find someone to do it for you, reviewing issues and pinging you on the actionable ones. I’d enjoy that work; I like keeping repositories clean.

> Github needs to step up their game and give authors more powerful tools

This is presumably what the discussions feature is meant to allow? A place to ask questions and discuss things rather than report bugs.

That is great if you are e.g. Facebook and pour a lot of resources into the community. But there are multiple archetypes of open source developers, and for most others reducing the amount of noise is more important than adding more channels. For many tools that add friction, thus increasing the quality would be much better.

Some random examples:

- Requiring any Issue to have some mandatory fields (version number, output, etc)

- Add some sort of "reputation" like StackOverflow for devs and require a minimum threshold

- Limit issues to those who actively contribute on Open Source (PRs, own open source, etc)

All of these would be opt-in by the maintainers of the project.

Could also kill two birds with one stone by limiting Issues and/or Discussions to Sponsors only (and collaborators)

Yes they have said this is the aim.

GitHub allows you to customize what kind of issues your project accepts [1]. Did you ever try setting up an issue template for bugs only? I'm considering doing that for my own project and I hope it will be effective.

[1] https://github.com/github/hub/issues/new/choose

Here's a thought that could potentially have bad consequences but is there a TOS for people commenting on issues on github? Can people be banned for repeated offenses?

You want to ban people from github for asking low-quality questions? Who is going to determine when a user's questions are low-quality enough?

GitHub encourages projects to add codes of conduct, the most popular of which are very much open to interpretation. So I guess you could just claim any given issue comment was a CoC violation.