Should we disable GitHub discussions?

[bracevac]

They seem mostly a write-only forum. And the scope is not very clear. We have several other places where people can discuss at various levels.

Though I could see it useful as a forum for deep technical discussions about the compiler. Apart from the internal Slack (which isn't open to the general public/might miss out some key contributors), we don't have such a focused forum. That comes with the downside of "yet another discussion channel". Thoughts?

[mbovel]

I think we should disable it.

I suggest high-level discussions continue to happen on contributors, and we use GitHub issues with itype:question for more specific or technical questions.

[som-snytt]

This is probably a good indicator that it should be shut down.

[neko-kai]

What about feature suggestions? Where should they go?

[mbovel]

I'd say contributors if it's a significant feature, or GitHub issue with the itype:enhancement label for smaller things.

[neko-kai]

@mbovel Requires a setting change to allow setting that label for non-members, I'm almost sure I can't add that (or any label other than those in predefined templates?) label on a newly created issue.

[mbovel]

Right, we'd update the "Suggest a feature" issue template to have the right labels and not point the discussions:

scala3/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/feature.md

Lines 1 to 10 in b6acd6c

	---
	name: "\U0001F389 Suggest a feature"
	about: Please create a feature request here https://github.com/scala/scala3/discussions/new?category=feature-requests
	title: ''
	labels: ''
	assignees: ''
	---
	Please create a feature request in the [Dotty Discussions](https://github.com/scala/scala3/discussions/new?category=feature-requests).

[SethTisue]

At minimum, I'd suggest removing any categories that would really be better on the forums. Currently we have:

[SethTisue]

fwiw, Lukas points out that in Scala 2 we have long used https://github.com/scala/scala-dev/issues for discussions that are internal-facing, yet not so sensitive that they must be private. Perhaps GitHub Discussions could play that role for Scala 3.

[bishabosha]

every discussion opened here (from me anyway) pretty much goes silent so i think it is not a place people are scanning or have notifications for

and it is discouraging IMO to point people to open "feature suggestions" here for that reason

[bracevac]

@odersky is in favor of keeping this, because he's been using the discussion section to document design drafts, as a place to have ideas available that do not require immediate scrutiny by the broader community. Maybe it's indeed the best course of action to just clean up the categories and point to other communication channels for anything else.