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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. If you want to improve quality of reports, GH now let's projects even ask some questions before opening an issue, to redirect users to the proper channel. And if the proper channel is an issue, there is the ISSUE.md template that has been working for several years already now.

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Contrarian view: I hate issue templates (at least as implemented) because they utterly cripple search for any word that appears in the template (and I’ve had this bite me more than once or twice). Most of the stuff people use templates for should instead be instructions outside the box, but GitHub doesn’t support that. If you’re going to follow the “big blob of text” model rather than having separate fields for much of the metadata, then your goal should be to have as little text as possible in any template, and avoid any words that people might want to search on.

Could you provide an example of the problem you describe?

I'm having trouble imagining it. My brain keeps telling me that the words I would search for would show up in the content even if they're used in a template. Is it maybe an issue of synonyms. Like error and exception might mean the same to one person and not another?

Sorry, it’s a year or so since it last happened (I haven’t been interacting with projects with heavy templates so recently) and I can’t remember any of them off the top of my head. One that I recall (but not the project or word) was a fairly common English word with two senses where I would have expected one or two false positives only, another was something more along the lines of “Versions (`uname -a`, `mylangc --version`, `mylangpkg --version`):” making “mylangpkg” unsearchable (in cases like this, disciplined use of labels can mitigate the damage).

The problem is that as soon as the template contains the word you’re searching for, every issue matches your search.

> My brain keeps telling me that the words I would search for would show up in the content even if they're used in a template.

Thats exactly how I read the description of the original problem. The issue template says something like "What text appears in the 'Current Status' pop-up?", and so then it becomes difficult to search for issues related to the "Current Status" pop-up not appearing at all, because searching for it will return all issues.

“Pop-up” and “text” are also scuppered by such a prompt, both of which will be fairly common significant terms in many types of apps.

I only know the issue templates with the chooser. Can you point me to the feature you referred to with „GH now let's projects even ask some questions before opening an issue“?

We are probably talking about the same feature. What I meant was this kind of page https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/new/choose

Ok. Thanks. That’s how we use it too. I guess the question thing got me confused.

Yeah sorry for that, it's a multichoice page which inherently asks you a "what are you trying to do?" question.

That looks fantastic.

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