Feedback on Team Discussions Sunset

[abhinavvadrevu]

Hi all,

I'm Abhinav, a Product Manager working on GitHub Discussions. As you may have seen, we announced the Team Discussions deprecation today. I'm creating this space for all of you to share any feedback on this deprecation and the timeline. It's our goal to make this migration as smooth as possible, so please let me know how it goes!

[azu]

Are there alternative ways to share messages in Private?

I maintain some Open Source projects using organization.
I've used Team Discussions for sharing private messages between maintainers.
For example, Onboarding for new member, Discussion on how to deal with security, Invitation for tools like 1Password for Open Source Projects, Moderation of team members etc...

My understanding is that the migration of team discussion can not be moved to other things because it will be public.

I can not use a private repository for this purpose because A private Repository has a limitation of 3 collaborators.
I can not use Organization Discussions because it is public.

I do not want to use email as possible. Also, I do not know email address of other members.
Slack/Discord is not suitable for tiny projects. The team member may not have an SNS account.
From another perspective, we write in English in Public space, but in Private space we may write in another language. This is because it may not be the member's first language. I seen this pattern in localization project.

I just want to use GitHub as possible.

[LeoColomb]

limitation of 3 collaborators

AFAIK, this is not true anymore.

[publicarray]

All our teams posts whent public... not what I understood a migration was. It's event tagged as "Team posts"

[Neodevils]

I think having a special place to talk with your collaborating developers were good for team discussions.

[LeoColomb]

Hi @abhinavvadrevu,

Actually, glad to see this consolidation between Team Discussions and Organization Discussions.
One thing though: the migration does not silent new post notification, resulting of hundreds (if not thousands) of notification email, one for everything single migrated post/comment.
It would be nice to make it quiet!

[abhinavvadrevu]

Thanks for the feedback here! We're actively working to fix this now.

[publicarray]

Hm ran into this one as well

[parisk]

I agree as well with the consolidation between Team Discussions and Repository Discussions.

One thing that would be useful though would be to be able to mark a team repository as the one holding team discussions — pretty much like we do for the organization. This would give a super useful and consistent user interface to hold smaller scale team discussions in a similar way you do for the organization.

Would totally welcome this.

[sison54]

This is a huge bummer. My organization has a lot of teams and different types of projects. Different teams don't need to be included in all of the discussions that are unrelated to them. I don't see the motivation in doing this.

[moving-bits]

I do not understand the reasoning behind this move (but I may have misread some details). GitHub discussions is already too crowded today (eg: see discussion in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/3097), and merging several sub-projects into a single discussion board will make things even worse and will render GitHub discussions close to useless.

I understand that there may be the wish for a discussion board on an organizational level, but this should not remove the feature of project-specific boards. Instead, make the features of GitHub discussions available for team discussions as well (eg: threaded display for replies).

Also the need for private boards in open-source projects mentioned in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/46769#discussioncomment-4918925 is a very valid point.

[LindseyB]

They do not all need to be in a single project board and can be in separate repository for each team.

[stephantamminga]

@abhinavvadrevu I read the Sunset Notice, but it is still unclear what the suggested alternative is. Our "organization" is the whole company with ~5000 people on the Github organization. For our department I created a team in which also the discussion board is used to communicate only within the department. According to the Sunset Notice, these discussion should be moved to company level? That doesn't make any sense. What am I missing here?

[abhinavvadrevu]

Hey @stephantamminga for your case, it probably makes the most sense to have a team-level repository (which can be private) and move your Team Discussions to a Repo-level Discussion there instead!

[stephantamminga]

Hmmm, that doesn't feel like a working solution. The team discussion would always be on the landing page of the team, a repo discussion would be buried somewhere. Is there an option to place announcements on a team page?
To be more specific: I'm using the team discussion function to put guidelines and such on the landing page. About that: what will be the landing page if discussions are removed?

[abhinavvadrevu]

Thanks for sharing this. Team Discussions weren't really designed for announcements this way. Any new discussion would cause previous ones to get buried on the landing page, so something like guidelines would quickly get buried. In Repo Discussions however, we have a category specifically for announcements. Also, many users of Repo Discussions use pinned discussions for things like guidelines to stay on the landing page. Team Discussions doesn't have those features. Since most of GitHub works around repos, we've found Repo Discussions to be far more discoverable than Team Discussions by most users, and they have seen significantly higher usage for that reason. I'd encourage you to try it out!

[abhinavvadrevu]

To answer the other question you have - the landing page of Team Discussions after deprecation will show a list of members in that team.

[stephantamminga]

Thanks for sharing this. Team Discussions weren't really designed for announcements this way. Any new discussion would cause previous ones to get buried on the landing page, so something like guidelines would quickly get buried.

Discussions can be pinned, which serves perfectly as an announcement.

[joneslee0918]

When it comes to engaging your online audience and gaining loyal customers, looks do matter.

[joneslee0918]

thanks for your efforts. I 'd like to take part in rRepo Discussions. Have a good time.

…

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 7:47 PM Abhinav Vadrevu ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks for sharing this. Team Discussions weren't really designed for announcements this way. Any new discussion would cause previous ones to get buried on the landing page, so something like guidelines would quickly get buried. In Repo Discussions however, we have a category specifically for announcements. Also, many users of Repo Discussions use pinned discussions for things like guidelines to stay on the landing page. Team Discussions doesn't have those features. Since most of GitHub works around repos, we've found Repo Discussions to be far more discoverable than Team Discussions by most users, and they have seen significantly higher usage for that reason. I'd encourage you to try it out! — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#46769 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/A5RV7ZOAYSCTJPTONHAGPDLWXV2KRANCNFSM6AAAAAAUVSX37A> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[froi]

Really sad to see this go.

Moving posts to yet another repo is a horrible "solution" and moving private team discussions to the org level breaks the purpose of having them private in the first place.

I understand the why but this just pushes out of GitHub for team comms and announcements.

[LindseyB]

They do not need to be at the org level you can have individual discussions on separate repositories.

[froi]

💯, but that really isn't a "team" discussion IMO. I tend to keep discussions in repos to be specific to that repo, "next to the code" if you will. Having "yet another repo" as a team repo is something that would then require us to go through security audits (cause it's a repo 🤷🏼 ), keep code owners documented, etc. Some are things that I'm trying to change in our org but it'll take time.

Being able to select some discussions to be private to the team or available to the general org was also useful.

This is all "me issues", but it's where I'm at 😅

[jsumners]

Sunsetting this without providing an alternative for private team member discussions is quite shortsighted.

[native-api]

As others have suggested, it's very unclear what the new intended way to hold team discussions is.

The suggested migration path to "Organization discussions" is an absolute no-go -- because that seems to make all the discussions public.

Without a workable new equivalent provided, projects will probably have to resort to using 3rd-party communication tools.

[softworkz]

What happens here is extremely unfortunate.

I totally missed the sunsetting notice and all discussions are gone now...
(the json file is a joke!)

What can we do now?

[OsirisTerje]

Has anyone written a tool to allow one to import the json file into an existing repo using the REST API?

[softworkz]

@abhinavvadrevu - Why can't you re-enable the migration tool you already had for all those (like me and others) who missed the deprecation?

The availability period of this has been way too short!

[jcs090218]

Can we have the team discussions feature back? It's a great feature to use when communicating with other collaborators (privately).

[mkurz]

Not having team discussions anymore sucks.
I think a good solution would be if you would allow making organization wide discussion categories/sections private, and being able to choose organization members + teams who have permissions to post or view the discussion(s) posted in such a category/section.