Welcome to pydata-sphinx-theme Discussions!

[choldgraf]

This is a test!

This is a quick test to see if we can use GitHub Discussions to more easily generate questions and feedback from folks in the community.

[12rambau]

I actually have questions about all these discussions flourishing on Github. what is the added value compared to issues tagged as "question" (one of the default tag in Github issue) ?
Also I am a big fan of SO and development forum and I have the feeling that Github discussions are creating silos that you need to listen individually to get all the questions, making it impossible to help people that have question on the edge of your knowledge domain e.g. for us the very broad python-sphinx SO tag.

I'm not fighting the idea I just need some help understanding the why.

[drammock]

personally I don't monitor StackOverflow very closely. I think I've seen a lot of issues opened here saying "What do people think about adding/supporting X?" or "what do people think is the best way to style component Z?" Seems like those might be cases where GH Discussions are quite appropriate. Not 100% clear that it's any better than just an issue... I guess the main difference is that you can't "close" a discussion, and you can upvote particular comments.

[choldgraf]

The way I think about it is that GitHub Issues are used for too many things, and so this decreases the signal-to-noise of issues in general. However, there are broadly two kinds of discussions that happen here:

1. General discussions, brainstorming, feedback, etc that doesn't necessarily have a clear end-result and may or may-not result in action.
2. Discussions with the explicit goal of shaping a plan that will then be tracked and implemented

I think that GitHub Discussions are useful for 1, and Issues are useful for 2, and the value in separating them is that you can both lower the barrier to participating in 1, and boost the signal to noise of 2 as a result.

But, it's an experiment, so maybe it won't work at all haha, just giving it a shot