Filing a /contact message leaves no trace

[rektide]

First off, I'd way rather #6 get's fixed right. But @github chimed in and isn't feeling it's for them. So:

I'm super insulted by how incredibly bad "1-1" support is. You fill out an oldschool text-box with maybe, maybe no markdown or nice github URL expansion- which sucks (completely outside the normal github text-editing experience). Then once you hit send, you get nothing except an 'Ok, thanks!'. There's no 'here's the letter we you sent us, save it for your records' no 'well send you an email of this'.

In my case I'd typed a semi thoughtful ask for a new way of doing a URL-expansion, I hit send, and all my text had disappeared- swallowed into the aether. Hitting back didn't show it; my submission to you is gone, out of my reach, because of the way you designed this flow. How rude Github!

So I filed a new http://github.com/contact saying the above- that when I contact you you swallow all the information and don't give me anything enduring I can use to talk about the transaction. That's really bad form. At the very least you could cough the submission back onto the screen. Ideally you'd open a private issue or something and give that private issue's url.

After I did that, I thought I'd try to google for places to discuss enhancements to @github, and I found #6, which is great. :+1 @isaacs for starting a public forum using comfortable software we know to improve software!

Even if you decide the politics involved in letting users work publically with you don't merit a revisiting, I beg you to help at least give them a non-destructive path into dealing with you where your software flows don't lock the user out of the words they've worked to convey to you.

[stuartpb]

Maybe somebody should add a Greasemonkey script that adds a checkbox on /contact to automatically file an issue on isaacs/github when you click "send" (or vice versa, a script to forward the description and a link to [email protected] when creating an issue on isaacs/github).

Actually, the latter really feels like it'd be the best for me: someone should write a bot that lets isaacs/github be the primary issue tracker, that posts any responses it gets from [email protected] regarding the issue.

[patcon]

👍

#94

[patcon]

And #128

[stuartpb]

Re #94, apparently GitHub doesn't want anybody building the emailer, so it looks like it's down to the userscript.

[stuartpb]

I've started work on this: https://github.com/ghes/isaacs-github-contact-xposter

[stuartpb]

And it's live: https://ghes.github.io/isaacs-github-contact-xposter/xposter.user.js

[rektide]

Regarding #326 (comment) , "Adding any kind of official community Issues repository would add a fourth source of truth and one that is far more difficult for us to maintain effectively." is fully respectable.

But, we're the public, we commiserate, and we find our own way if politically github just can't.

We happen to use github to commiserate over a lot of shit, and we're going to do it about you too on you too, as here we all are.

The support email that was relayed into public for benefit of all goes on to say- "Heroku ran into the same issue some time ago and they made the decision to retire their mailing list, after some push back, they instead decided to hand it off to the community so that no Heroku employees are dedicated to moderating the list." which seems like a great compromise, and is a justly far afield use-case they've chosen to cite, one rather far apart from 'we don't want users building tools/communities to help them better help themselves,' which is to say I think adding a mechanized website to help out with this particular problem is a nasty hack github invites in on themselves, albiet one that's likely to cause some escalation as github tries to workaround public walking and actualizing LINES OF DESIRE.

But just having a greasemonkey script will make my own world much better, so ✨ 💥 ✨