Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: How can we improve the Forem repo?

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emma profile image
Emma Goto

For people new to the codebase, I think it would help if more tickets pointed users in the general direction of what files they need to touch. It makes things a lot easier.

I think the problem is that there are some good labels set up at the moment but then you have to scroll through the comments, ask questions for clarification, and make sure the ticket hasn't already been picked up by someone else. I think sometimes contributors have to do a bit of work upfront to find a ticket they feel comfortable working on.

Filtering by a ticket that's assigned to someone or not could be good, but then you'd be missing out on tickets that were at one point assigned but are no longer being worked on.

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao

On this end, do you think it would be helpful to have some sort of onboarding or welcome flow? I personally would love a "Start here" section in our contributing section of the readme. Or maybe a GitHub bot/Action that does this?

Just some freeflowing thoughts 😅 Thanks for raising this point!

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emma profile image
Emma Goto

Yes! It would be great if users didn't have to browse through Github issues. It would be pretty cool if there was even some sort of a UI that would present issues in a more appealing/friendly format (but that's probably outside the scope of Forem/DEV).

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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emma profile image
Emma Goto • Edited

Test2 (sorry, was trying to reproduce a commenting bug but its not letting me delete this comment now).

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citizen428 profile image
Michael Kohl

make sure the ticket hasn't already been picked up by someone else

Once someone volunteers on the issue, we generally assign it to them. This is also mentioned in the automatic reply we post on every new issue:

To claim an issue to work on, please leave a comment. If you've claimed the issue and need help, please ping @forem /oss and we will follow up within 3 business days.

Alas not everyone always follows this process, but overall this seems to be working out quite nicely lately.

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rafi993 profile image
Rafi

There is one minor thing when you mention @forem /oss generally it appears in normal font weight not in bold like when you mention user. I was confused couple of times because of this (double checking if I typed it correctly). It would be nice if the text @forem /oss could also be made bold in Github comment.

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citizen428 profile image
Michael Kohl

Unfortunately it seems team mentions were primarily intended for internal use, there doesn't seem a way to make them work as expected when external contributors use them ☚ī¸

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emma profile image
Emma Goto

That's true - I think as a beginner to a repo you might not take that extra step of filtering though, and just default to looking through "good first issue".

Also I've found that sometimes there are some good tickets to work on that have already been picked up by someone else, but it will have been over a month or quite some time since it has been assigned to them and they never had the chance to work on it.

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citizen428 profile image
Michael Kohl

All good points and we're definitely aware of these issues. Maybe we could aid this process by automatically adding another label when assigning someone, but we're open to all suggestions 😃