About GitHub Discussions
With GitHub Discussions, the community for your project can create and participate in conversations within the project's repository. Discussions empower a project's maintainers, contributors, and visitors to gather and accomplish the following goals in a central location, without third-party tools.
- Share announcements and information, gather feedback, plan, and make decisions
- Ask questions, discuss and answer the questions, and mark the discussions as answered
- Foster an inviting atmosphere for visitors and contributors to discuss goals, development, administration, and workflows
You don't need to close a discussion like you close an issue or a pull request.
If a repository administrator or project maintainer enables GitHub Discussions for a repository, anyone who visits the repository can create and participate in discussions for the repository. Repository administrators and project maintainers can manage discussions and discussion categories in a repository, and pin discussions to increase the visibility of the discussion. Moderators and collaborators can mark comments as answers, lock discussions, and convert issues to discussions. For more information, see "Repository permission levels for an organization."
For more information about management of discussions for your repository, see "Managing discussions in your repository."
About discussion organization
You can organize discussions with categories and labels.
You can categorize discussions to help community members begin conversations in the right place, and to help community members find related discussions. All discussions must be created in a category. People with maintain or admin permissions define the categories for a repository. Each category has a format: open-ended discussion, question and answer, or announcement. Each repository can have up to 10 categories.
For discussions with a question/answer format, an individual comment within the discussion can be marked as the discussion's answer. GitHub will automatically recognize community members who contribute the most comments marked as answers to discussions with a question/answer format.
Maintainers can use categories with the announcement format to share information, releases, or events. To keep discussions in these categories focused on important updates, only people with maintain or admin permissions can create new discussions, but anyone can comment and reply.
For more information, see "Managing categories for discussions in your repository."
To organize discussions more granularly, you can apply labels. For example, you can use labels to indicate the status of a discussion to make triaging more efficient. Each repository has one shared set of labels for issues, pull requests, and discussions. For more information, see "Managing labels."
Best practices for GitHub Discussions
As a community member or maintainer, start a discussion to ask a question or discuss information that affects the community. For more information, see "Collaborating with maintainers using discussions."
Participate in a discussion to ask and answer questions, provide feedback, and engage with the project's community. For more information, see "Participating in a discussion."
You can spotlight discussions that contain important, useful, or exemplary conversations among members in the community. For more information, see "Managing discussions in your repository."
If an issue turns out to be a question or open-ended conversation instead of a work item to track and prioritize, you can convert the issue to a discussion. For more information, see "Moderating discussions in your repository."
Sharing feedback
You can share your feedback about GitHub Discussions with GitHub. To join the conversation, see github/feedback
.