Show HN: Feature voting for GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Feature voting for GitHub

feathub.com

108 pointsEcco55 comments

This is interesting but like that one site that was bought recently (get satisfaction) this is another site that I, as a repository owner, has to track down to find customer feedback. Kinda like Gitter.im, yet another external service I have to be aware of.

It's difficult to be omnipresent so I can track all of the different pieces of feedback my project may be getting; even though it's not ideal I'd rather everyone just funnel through Github issues just so I can interact with them and be aware of any issues or requests. I don't want to miss out on any feedback should it be on an external service I do not know about.

Gitter.im has an IRC interface so at least I can idle in my projects gitter irc chat in emacs when programming in the best programming language node.js

Thanks, I should probably look into that... I already have a pandora and slack window open all the time, and to add gitter.im to the mix, it's rarely open... I kind of wish I could just do it all from IRC.

I'm starting to think that creating a newer, extensible IRC client might be an opportunity.

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I agree with you, having to keep tabs with thousands of new services is annoying.

In that case though, you shouldn't have to worry about missing some users' feedback. That's why you have to register your project with FeatHub before people can give feedback (we temporarily enabled anonymous import to boostrap the service, but that won't last). This way, as a repo owner, you know you have enabled FeatHub.

Also, it's not implemented now, but we could imagine notifying owners on a regular basis. I suggested the improvement there: http://feathub.com/feathub/feathub/+8

The pattern of "Oh, sure, we're associated with that project" is a very dark one. "Contribute to something on GitHub off of GitHub" has been used by a number of hard-to-verify bitcoin tip sites, recruiter schemes, and shadier characters. I hope featurehub goes opt-in very soon so it can avoid a noisy argument like this one that made it to HN last October:

https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127

Oh, I hadn't seen this. That's very interesting, thanks for the pointer. I'll fix this ASAP.

That's a better, faster response than I have ever seen to this topic. I wish HN let me post a happy animated GIF to celebrate your choice!

I'm glad that it DOES NOT support gifs.

Done! Now you have to own a project on GitHub to be able to add it on FeatHub :)

It seems like you build off the comments of issues, parsing for the :+1:, you could functionally provide the same tooling, but in the same additive way that waffle.io does.

We're not parsing GitHub comments ATM. That's a good idea though, but it would be difficult to track content. Maybe it's just simpler to track issues in one place and improvements in another?

Looking at Waffle.io, it seems to me that they don't actually store any data on their end. Everything is managed with issues, comments, and tagging.

It would be nice if GitHub just had a way to vote on issues without cluttering the comments and sending out lots of useless emails.

Example: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-installers/issues/12

Would it be sketchy if feathub built a bot that periodically posted feathub summaries in the github issues system?

And, like Get Satisfaction, it's a pretty dick move to imply to my users that I'm affiliated with you and that their voices can be heard through you. I certainly have sympathy for Mark Otto (https://twitter.com/mdo/status/591707867498946560) asking them to stop doing that.

You shouldn't have to opt out of stuff like this.

That was a mistake. We've made it fully opt-in now.

Also here's the whole Twitter conversation: https://twitter.com/feathub/status/591715888782520320

Why doesn't it link directly to issues on github?

It would get annoying having two separate lists of features (and, presumably, bugs). One on github and one on this service.

Still, if it just did voting on issues on github, I'd find it pretty useful.

It could easily use the API to parse comments for +1 / thumbsup emoji / etc too. Also could have a lil viral component, when you +1 on the app, it adds a comment with a link to the app.

That's something we made on purpose. We believe feature requests and issues should be treated differently.

In our vision, an issue refers to a bug in the software. It doesn't need voting: it's up to the developers to figure out the gravity of the situation (or to an analytics tool that gather how many times a given issue arises).

On the other hand, a feature request refers to a new capability of said software. It then makes sense for users to vote, because, as a developer, it's hard to know which feature is the most expected.

>We believe feature requests and issues should be treated differently.

Github doesn't. Issues can be tagged as 'bug' or 'enhancement' and they're both treated essentially the same way.

>it's up to the developers to figure out the gravity of the situation

Sure would be nice if there were some sort of tool that could help with figuring that out.

Those are just default tags to a (very limited) issue tracking system. "Enhancement" could very well be (and is) used by developers for planned features, not necessarily requests from end users.

Heck, the title of the page you access that system on is called "issues".

> We believe feature requests and issues should be treated differently.

If you want other people to use what you made, you may have to do what they want. :)

> In our vision, an issue refers to a bug in the software.

Overloading causes miscommunication, and can affect how we think! Github issues aren't about issues, as in bugs. It's a moldable concept to keep track important things. Lots of repos already use Github issues to track features, as well as many other things, why not help their lives?

> If you want other people to use what you made, you may have to do what they want. :)

Exactly. First thing I did when visiting the comments here was see if someone had brought up this issue. Just some more feedback (to indicate a consensus): I won't consider using this tool unless it provides easy access back to GitHub.

An example of a successful project that does bi-directional linking is BountySource.

I like the idea, but would prefer if GitHub just integrated this functionality. Otherwise, how will the developers know that something was voted on unless they use these third-party tools?

They would know because they would have registered their project on FeatHub :-)

I'm surprised this feature isn't in github already ... is there a reason?

I wish I knew!

It was, long ago, but it was removed. I believe the reason was that it wasn't very useful, but that was a while back, so I could be wrong.

Huh. I've been using GH since about the first year it launched I don't recall ever seeing this. Do you mean a way to vote on things, or feature requests?

There was a little up vote triangle on issues, but it was really really long ago.

Is it me or this is very similar to the way zenhub.io [1] works?

Anyway, I recently also stumble upon a similar tool that enables voting for PR and even auto merges the code [2], which is not precisely the scope that feathub targets, but it is very useful and similar enough to worth mentioning it :p

[1] https://www.zenhub.io/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286

It's really hard to add features to someone else's app in such a disconnected way, for everyone in their community. Most people haven't heard of your site, and it's also hard to form habits of checking Github, as well as your page. Usability improvements ... should makes things easier!

Repo owners have control over what gets displayed on their project page (to an extent), and can drive their subset of users to your app.

If owners are having trouble seeing how many people up voted a feature, then make a bot that counts the number of thumbs up in an issue tagged "feature", then update the issue title. This would be really helpful to those people.

Also, if owners want to see the top feature requests, make an embeddable image for the README that clicks to the full list. People love embeddable widgets. :D

Those two things is all I observe your app does, plus you had to reinvent commenting, which is a huge turn off.

There are loads of popular tools out there that integrate into Github, it's worth checking them out to see how they weasel their features into Github.com!

The thumb + 1 scares me, it makes me think I am going to like it on Facebook, and that I am somehow connected. Even though I know it's not.

Just click the "Thumb down -1" then :-D Facebook denied it from us for so long, now's your time to take revenge :-)

https://twitter.com/mdo/status/591707867498946560

Mark Otto ‏@mdo · 24 minutes ago Hey @feathub, please remove Bootstrap from your site—we've no plans to use it and it's disingenuous to imply we do.

Legitimate request of course. That was a genuine mistake from our part, the service is opt-in only now. Here's the full Twitter conversation: https://twitter.com/feathub/status/591715888782520320

On this topic, can someone recommend a simple feature voting tool with SSO? Something similar to this but not tied to GitHub?

When I looked again at Get Satisfaction, User Voice, etc they're all so bloated with features and complication.

Looking for a way to direct my signed in users to a simple page to vote up a list of features we're considering.

Features like these are better if integrated into Github itself. There's this long thread about implementing a +1 feature https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/9

I've been looking for something like this for a while now but honestly if you run a non-technical service requiring your users to sign up for a github account (just to vote on features) is a pretty big ask. Integration with other AUTH services like Facebook/Google would be very beneficial.

I was always using UserVoice. It's quite cheap, and even has (or at least had) discounts for open-source/non-profit projects.

That's a decision we made on purpose.

We figured out our early adopters would be on GitHub, that's why we started with GitHub login. Fell free to add a feature request on http://feathub.com/feathub/feathub :-)

Also, while we're at it, we could even consider anonymous voting (http://feathub.com/feathub/feathub/+15)

This raises the question of the gameability of the voting, but this could be mitigated using a mixture of cookies, captchas and browser fingerprinting.

The Bountysource browser extension is similar. It works with existing votes and +1's from GitHub, Bugzilla, Trac, etc.

https://www.bountysource.com/extension

Shamelessly advertising your own product, heh? ;-) (GitHub seems to believe you work a Bountysource: https://github.com/wkonkel)

Anyway, you're right, it is similar. FeatHub doesn't require an extension though, so you can just point your users to your project's voting page.

Bountysource doesn't require you to use another website though. You stick to using Github and get some added functionality.

It apparently requires a browser extension. Is that actually better? I'd rather direct my customers to a third-party site I have a relationship with than ask them to install a plugin.

(Disclaimer: I have no product or customers to worry about, just musing)

It's also available on the web for any project, for example:

https://www.bountysource.com/teams/bountysource/issues

You don't need to install the plugin with Bountysource to use it - it just adds a handy button and counter to the issue list.

You can still direct users to the Bountysource page for your project if that's what you prefer.

(I'm not associated with Bountysource at all - I just think it's pretty good at what it does).

It says "See how they are listening to their users" on the home page. Does this imply that not using this tool or not desiring feature voting is the same as ignoring your users? That's some pretty unpleasant positioning IMO.

I read that as "See the way (the solution) they're using to listen to their users."

That was the intended meaning :-) Do you guys have any suggestion on how to remove the ambiguity?

This is fantastic. This is perfect for an OpenSource maintainer to get insight into the users priorities on the issues. Thank you for creating this tool.

I'd like to use it for one of my projects (https://github.com/dbcli/pgcli). Even though I've authorized feathub to access my organizations, the repo is not listed in the drop down.

Thanks! That's weird that it didn't appear… I'll look into it.

Meanwhile, I've created the project for you. Here you go: http://feathub.com/dbcli/pgcli

If you have any idea for an improvement, we would love to hear about it there: http://feathub.com/feathub/feathub :-)

It doesn't load more than 30 projects in the dropdown menu when I try to setup my repository.

I'd use a Chrome extension that let me request features for the website I'm currently on.

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