Creating open source software today is so much more than the source code. It’s about managing the influx of great ideas, developing the next generation of maintainers, helping new developers learn and grow, and establishing the culture and personality of your community.
Over the past year, thousands of communities of all shapes and sizes have been using the GitHub Discussions beta as the central space for their communities to gather on GitHub in a productive and collaborative manner. We’ve learned a lot from your customer feedback and have shipped many highly requested features along the way, so we’re ready now for Discussions to enter its next chapter.
Today, we’re excited to announce that GitHub Discussions is officially out of beta. Let’s take a look at what you can do with Discussions and how top open source communities are using it.
GitHub Discussions equips your community and core team with the tools and processes to make community engagement fun and collaborative. In addition to marking the most helpful answers, upvoting, customizing categories, and pinning big announcements, we’ve added the following features to Discussions to help maintainers stay on top of community management.
Just because Discussions is now out of beta doesn’t mean we’ll stop shipping your highly requested features. We’re excited to share upcoming features that will help maintainers become more connected to their communities than ever.
As a recap, here’s what you can do with Discussions, including a sneak peek at what’s to come.
We’ve been very intentional in partnering closely with vibrant open source communities. Managing an open source community is already burdensome enough, and Discussions has made maintainers’ lives easier, not harder.
“GitHub Discussions has allowed us to grow the Next.js community in the same tool that we use to collaborate. This has allowed us to collaborate and interact with our community that has grown by 900% since moving to GitHub Discussions.”
~ @timneutkens, maintainer of Next.js
“ Discussions have enabled the communities I work with to engage in a space dedicated to them that’s accessible, removing the necessity to set up bespoke solutions or to take on the burden of maintaining additional external services.”
~ @bnb, maintainer of Node
“We had forum software before, but allowing all our contributors to find the forum on one platform has done wonders for the engagement. Being able to easily link between issues and discussions, allowing everyone to keep track of the history, has been one of those delightful experiences that sometimes make tech feel like magic (again).”
~ @SMillerDev, maintainer of Homebrew
“GitHub Discussions enabled us to make feature launches more community-centered as each feature and experiment got its own discussion in a dedicated space outside of the issue tracker. With its threading support, we were able to individually address comments without losing them in the larger discussion. A great side-effect of this is that our issue tracker is now separate from questions, feature requests, and general chit-chat.”
~ @LekoArts, maintainer of Gatsby
If you are an admin or a maintainer of a repository, you can enable Discussions under “Features” in the repository settings. Happy discussion-ing!
For feedback and questions, visit GitHub Discussions feedback. For more information, visit GitHub Discussions documentation.
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