GitHub adds new discussions feature

Github has added a new feature to help teams and communities better collaborate, share updates, and gather information. GitHub Discussions is a collaborative communication forum for the community around an open-source project. Discussions are for conversations that need to be transparent and accessible but do not need to be tracked on a project board and are not related to code, unlike GitHub Issues. Discussions enable fluid, open conversation in a public forum.

Discussions give space for more collaborative conversations by connecting and giving a more centralised area to connect and find information. The key benefits include:

• Contributions: Pinning and locking discussions help people know that a post is meant as an announcement. One can use announcements as a way to link people to more resources and offer guidance for opening discussions in the community.

• Guidelines: Setting up contributing guidelines will encourage collaborators to have meaningful, useful conversations that are relevant to the repository. One can also update the repository's README to communicate expectations on when collaborators should open an issue or discussion.

• Organising discussions: Repository owners and people with write access can create new categories to keep discussions organised. Discussions can also be recategorised after they are created.

• Promoting healthy conversations: People with write permissions for a repository can help surface important conversations by pinning discussions, deleting discussions that are no longer useful or are damaging to the community, and transferring discussions to more relevant repositories.

Click here for details.