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Adam Crockett 🌀
Adam Crockett 🌀

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🎭 Community engagement : submit issues in less time 🗳️⏱️

I didn't know this until today but I'm really happy to tell you about it, maybe it will help your opensource projects, it absolutely sped up my productivity.

When you are writing documentation or error messages you want to make it easy to contribute issues (that's beyond just bugs and features). Aspire to make it so easy that the community member doesn't need to do very much, so when you ask for a new issue to be submitted (because you should drive what you want from your community) you can do a lot of the work for them.

How?

tip: a really great way to do this on GitHub is using the create issue URL for the issue form itself, but did you know that it can be prefilled via query parameters!? Well you may know GitHubs API is extensive and a shining light of how far we must go to design APIs, it might not have been obvious that you can do this, here are some great parameters to pass:

did you know that it can be prefilled via query parameters!?

Adam talks about the GitHub issues form, enthusiastically for 9 straight hours

Usage

  • title
  • body
  • label
  • there's probably more...
?title=my-idea&body=ummmm&label=documentation 
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Dynamism

A use case might be (I've tested this) a static website such as a documentation website where you want to allow people to submit plugins for curation, a form is added to your SPA and the form builds up the issue link dynamically, the submit button is actually a link, taking you to the now prefilled form, users just hit submit and boom you have a much better dynamicly filled out issue and the author needed to do very little on GitHub, they felt like they where on your documentation website most of the time.

Hope you liked it, please like, comment and follow for more great tips and random insights that nobody asked for but everyone kinda needs!

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