One (Perhaps Surprising) Reason Why I may Silently Ignore a Github Issue - Is it incorrectly formatted? | /en/2018/05/github-issue-format/

yihui 2022-12-17 03:51:59

One (Perhaps Surprising) Reason Why I may Silently Ignore a Github Issue - Is it incorrectly formatted?

https://yihui.org/en/2018/05/github-issue-format/

1 Comment

giscus-bot 2022-12-17 03:52:00

Guest *Scott K* @ 2018-06-14 17:20:56 originally posted:

Good points, Yihui. I often ignore questions that do not provide an MWE. Sometimes I tell posters this (in a polite way, to help them learn that posting an MWE is going to increase the chance that they get help). Sometimes they get upset, but I tell them that I spend a lot of time helping others and I have to decide how to allocate that time.

Maybe you can keep a running list of mistakes people make, and then instead of silently ignoring an issue, respond by linking to the list (or just link to this blog article?). This way, you can teach the issue creators without much effort on your part, and they have a chance to learn from their mistakes.

yihui 2022-12-17 03:52:01

That is a really good suggestion, and is exactly one of the reasons why I keep writing blog posts. As one example, I has pointed people to this post for perhaps more than 100 times on different occasions: https://yihui.name/en/2017/05/when-in-doubt-upgrade/ Basically I want to teach users that they might save both of our time by simply upgrading software. You can see I have been accumulating the issues at the end of the post, and the list jus keeps growing :)

I don't know what other bloggers do, but I often update my previous posts. I'll surely come back to edit this post when I see new problems in Github issue formatting. Thanks for the suggestion!

Originally posted on 2018-06-14 20:00:56

giscus-bot 2022-12-17 03:52:02

Guest *Scott K* @ 2018-06-19 03:50:53 originally posted:

That is a good plan!