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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

The main problem we have with GitHub issues is that it's pretty overwhelming for some of our clients - especially as GitHub has no concept of "issues only users". Our clients set up a GitHub account to open a ticket and suddenly find themselves looking at source code, commits, pull requests, CI stuff - just endless noise around the one thing that's actually important to them. On GitHub, for someone to be allowed to move a ticket from one column to another in a project kanban board you have to give them full write access to the entire repository, it's madness. GitHub issues is great for developers, but an absolute mess for anyone that has to work with the developers.

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Agree. We are putting out a public projects option where you can get feedback from users (instead of internal teams). Very similar to github issues.

But the what we need to get over is - how can we ever replace Github Issues. I mean, it is 'integrated' into github and will be a natural place for people to report issues. Like MS bundling IE or Google calendar adding Google Meet links into calendar invites automatically.

Good question, and something I did actually start writing about in my original post but worried it was diluting the point. I think it would need to sync seamlessly with GitHub so issues referenced in commit messages link the commit to the issue - possibly even two way sync with GitHub issues - for it to still be usable and useful for the dev team.

But, GitHub has really only sown up the issues part for developers, for everyone else it's a mess - so if your differentiator is building something that's useful to everyone _else_ on the project, you could be on to a winner. On our projects, the everyone else typically outnumber the developers by about 3 to 1, sometimes even more. These are designers, project managers, client-side stakeholders etc. All of these people need to interact with an issue system, all of them need to be able to track progress, all of them need visibility on how a project is going.

Jira will tell you that that's what they do, but of course it isn't, Jira is a crime against humanity.

Yes, but its a brilliant starting point!

Github does seem to have a marketplace that we could get into. Maybe something we can explore.

Sync is simple to sort out.

We were thinking of two kinds of projects 1. Private - for the internal dev teams to work on 2. Public - for external folks like end users to work with internal teams

Now I see another one which is CLIENTS only - for a restricted set of external users.

> GitHub has no concept of "issues only users"

Thought: Make a free marketplace extension that allows a one-click "configure this user's subscriptions to different event types to make it into an issues-only user from that user's POV".

Both useful and if done right would hopefully be much more of a way to get people to engage with your product/brand than it would be "enabling a competitor" (I think ... or at least: I'm not trying to convince you to do something against your own interests for my own gain here, but that does not at all mean I'm not completely wrong ;)

That's such a great observation. I think everyone has seen non developers added to git repos only to see their accounts sitting around unused for exactly that reason

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