I was surprised to find that someone left a brief "thank you" issue on one of my open source projects (a Kubernetes hairpin proxy to fix issues with cert-manager and LoadBalancers) and it feels great to know that the right people are finding it and resolving the same problem that led me to build it.
I humbly hope that sharing this might inspire more humanity and gratitude in the open source community.
I'm always amazed at how more people do not know about the Proxy protocol. (Also why is this not an RFC?)
I suspect one reason is because the cloud vendors push hard for layer 7 routing, and cloud managed cert management. (ie: ALB and ACM.) These have a lot of vendor lock-in, whereas k8s layer 4 ingress and cert-manager do not.
Similarly, I got a shoutout/tag on a PR that used some of my code. It made my day, and made me assume that the org the engineer works in must be a pretty good place to work.
I run a website with hundreds of documents simply explaining how I resolved issues. It keeps me going when people simply email me to say thank you.
As an example, one of my most popular pages is a set of instructions on how to install 20 year old sewing machine software, that requires hardware keys, on modern Windows machines.
I've wanted to do this for the mundane to complicated issues I've faced, even for myself since sometimes I need to reproduce something (or help someone for the same problem). Never really sure what platform to use or how to do it. Because issues are very broad and it then looks messy. I've looked at your wiki and I'm still unsure how to proceed...
I did the same a while ago with a really useful tool that had helped me save a lot of time [0].
I think it's a really good idea to provide thanks and gratitude like this because I know its very validating and motivational for someone to reach out and just say thanks.
This should be especially true for more niche projects that gather less recognition but you can still find very useful.
It's a wonderful idea however it should be a nudge and not a requirement. A software with a SATA license as proposed there could not be redistributed by a Linux distro, because the distro could not enforce the SATA with the end user.
After seeing so many articles on HN about people quitting the OSS community due to toxic members, its refreshing to see something coming from a good note. I am sure others feel the same, and some work on their own open source projects and can appreciate the post. Simple gratitude can go a long way.
I think that we (I include myself) are so wrapped up in our own struggles that we often fail to do the simplest things. Yes, one can't live on "thanks" alone, but we should offer gratitude more often.
As someone who occasionally gets thanked for my writing, it is great to know that some of my shouting into the void has actually helped a person.
Maybe GitHub should add an optional "Thanks" feedback channel, perhaps also include a place where users can submit success stories about their use of the given project. This could fill the role of a channel to express gratitude, and provide a place where prospective users could see how others have utilized the project successfully in the real world.
Another positive variation of saying thanks is bringing to attention a great feature of a tool. The authors of the tool might not be aware at how impactful a feature is and if something like that gets enough upvotes / love then it could help prevent regressions or the feature disappearing at a later point in time. It also lets the authors know you care (see the first reply below).
Whenever I find a really cool open source software that helps me and is made by individuals without some big company sponsorship, I try to reach out, say thanks and send them some beer money.
Obviously it does not help much but I think this is a nice gesture and I wish more people did this.
Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.
The trouble with GitHub discussions is that GitHub couldn't decide if it wanted discussions, or Stack Overflow style Q&A with upvotes, so it morphed into this awkward hybrid.
I thought the star button was a convenient way to keep track of projects you're interested in.
> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?
I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.
Good point. I had a cross project issue come in to a small project of mine a few years ago. The maintainers of the other project actually brought up their much larger number of stars to (try to) belittle me. Since that day I’ve noticed the correlation between stars and the kind of response I’m apt to get, negative in both senses.
Two times recently I wanted to express thanks (or just ask a question) and couldn't. In both cases there was no way to message the person via GitHub because they'd not publically shared their email address. In one case there was no way to open an 'issue'. And in the other, it wasn't relating to a repo, but a really excellent tutorial.
In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.
This is what I wonder. I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?" For anyone tasked with maintaining a repo, any email notification of new issues must come with a certain level of dread. At least that's what it's like for me, even if I sincerely appreciate and enjoy receiving issues!
I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with responding in any way, but still... And for any watcher, I imagine they are interested in notifications relevant to actual issues, not thank yous.
My opinion is the current best way to say thank you is probably a star. Beyond that, it would be nice if GitHub added a way to leave a thank you or testimonial or something like that. Or even a formal "the repo is in use by such and such app/company."
I think it depends on the scale of the project. If it's a project that isn't full of all kinds of bug reports and issues already, thank you notes aren't a bad thing.
As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.
> As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.
i'll second this.
post some screenshots of the thing you've made with my thing, or how it's improved the user experience or performance improvement metrics. what has my project unlocked for you, e.g. new use cases that were not possible before. compare it to what was there previously. i build open source stuff to scratch my own itches. knowing that it scratches the itches of 10k people instead of just 1 is the best outcome -- maximized impact.
just a thanks is nice but ultimately lowest effort and not that gratifying.
> I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?"
I've deliberately not opened "Thank you" issues, because I didn't want to annoy the owner/watchers. Certainly frustrating there is no way to express gratitude.
I star projects that have caught my attention and might be relevant for my work, or that I will need to reference later. I don't see how this relates to a display of gratitude.
Saying "thank you" expresses an infinite amount more gratitude than someone taking half a second to click a button. Please don't boil positivity down into just another dopamine fix. It's so fucking fake.
Star too, donate too, whatever you'd like to do normally too but nothing beats actually using your words
If you put it that way, I think GitHub could enable a platform feature to collect finance contributions from fans/users. Heck, even licensing costs. That makes open source programmers earn some money as well - of course along with a text field to say “thanks”.
Yeah that’s the issue: “star” doesn’t have clearly defined semantics, so everyone uses them in their own way. In addition to bookmarking, I do star for gratitude because having repos with stars is very advantageous for contributors. I really appreciate getting stars on many levels.
I do that sometimes. I sent an email recently to thank the author of XLD [0], an excellent piece of software hosted on Sourceforge, where I don’t have an account. I wouldn’t say it’s about low effort, so much as not taxing the recipient: with an email a person may feel more compelled to reply than with an opened and immediately closed issue.
I always look for a Twitter account or something to send my gratitude to. It feels like a more natural place to do it than in an issue. The only downside is that a tweet only goes to one person, while if you open an issue, all contributors can see it more easily.
Opening and then closing "thank you" issues solves the annoyance problem, doesn't it? It's a NOOP for the maintainer, but it gets the message across. /$0.02
Sure, but it's not an issue with the project, it's a message to the developer(s). While it is a NOOP, it is not something which should appear in the ("technical") stats.
What I usually do is append something like "thank you for the effort" (and sometimes explain how good this project is for my use case) when I open a new issue or comment on an existing one.
This is not what you are talking about but I would like to mention that as a contributor I feel like I often get a thank you note after I open a PR or even an issue in stranger repos. In my experience gratitude towards contributors is the norm, not the exception.
This is baked into Git at the core, but just like many other cases, GitHub subverts the intent of fundamental expectations about the way Git is supposed to be used and actively goes out of its way to make it difficult if you're interacting with the project through GitHub instead of local tools. (In fact, for new GitHub accounts, it even defaults to obscuring users' contact info, and it attributes all changes made through the web UI to an opaque @github.com email address. You have to deliberately go into the settings to turn this off, without ever getting a notification that that's what GitHub is doing.)
I loved a library on github enough to track down the creator on twitter and thank him there. Not sure if he never saw it, or just didn't acknowledge it.
The missing state is 'resolved' between 'open' and 'closed' giving that time/space for interaction, or perhaps a closed disposition label 'resolved' as long as it is as easily surfaced.
Brave browser has made this integration where you can tip their token to people on GitHub (and Twitter, reddit and any site that people can verify domain ownership). Seems one of the best ways to show appreciation and gratitude without making it feel like a transaction or causing any kind of expectation like becoming a sponsor or patron of the project.
Besides being a global payment system that allows people to send micropayments across the world without having to disclose any financial data publicly, while fighting surveillance capitalism in the process, what have the Romans done for us?
The "hassle" of doing KYC at one of the exchanges and verifying your identity is only once. The benefit of being able to receive little cash for privacy-preserving ads and use it to contribute to a healthier digital economy can last for a long time.
Idk. I think your comment sums up a general change that internet based interaction has created. I used to think it was generational but now I think it has more to do with spending most of your socializing online as opposed to in person.
In person interaction naturally flows towards gratitude. Online interactions, like the one I’m having right now feels disposable. I don’t see your face and we can’t form much human connection.
This leads to an online world of shallow interactions that leave us feeling alone an empty. Much like what happens to people that live in large dense cities.
Our online interactions are so shallow, we feel it is the responsibility a product we are buying to facilitate a particular form of interaction as opposed to simply taking it upon ourselves to do it.
You have to work against that. It is usually totally possible to write an email to people with good repos. If they made your day, this is just part of giving back.
We're talking about interrupting a stranger to listen to us here. How often do you do that IRL? Do you just do it any old time, or do you look for certain signals that it is OK?
I do think there is a generational "thing" where older people tend to see online interactions as superficial and unreal, while younger people see them as a natural extension of the IRL social sphere. As a younger person, I find it easy to point out that interactions with strangers present similar difficulties whether online or IRL.
Maybe we should bring back the "guest books" of the early internet, where you're expected to leave positive feedback if you want to.
I'm not sure that general purpose reviews/forums are the right way to address this issue, because those can generate negative feedback as easily as positive and generate additional stress for the maintainer. I think a simple dedicated "you can leave a public thank you message to the maintainer here if you want" text box would do the trick.
I wonder if fairly standard reviews might be helpful here. 1-5 stars, with text, and perhaps also links to issues if there are problems and an opportunity to share "used at $company" for endorsement.
Or perhaps just a built-in "endorsement" feature, which companies can use to indicate that they use a project and find it valuable, perhaps listed on the sidebar. Could also segue into paid sponsorship and support.
Insofar as GitHub provides package management, they could also prompt companies to endorse the packages they use.
All of this might get annoying, nasty, or inauthentic, of course. Would need to be careful...
I guess that is one features Github should "try" and work. Somewhere that users can express their gratitude ( in a non subtle way ) Sometimes it isn't just a dollar of sponsor, but people explaining what problem they had, how it help them, and notes of thanks.
After all, Github is more like a Social Coding Platform.
> Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"?
Yes, because it is, but I'd dispute the claim that GitHub discourages it. If anything, the people who use GitHub are more willing/most likely to misuse bugtracker for not just support requests but also general discussion and comments like this. It seems like there's a (non) issue like this that gets linked at least once a month on HN. I click through, get annoyed with the person who opened it, read the maintainer's response, get annoyed with their endorsement/encouragement of the idea, close the window, and then file it away in my mind or my bookmarks or both as an example of how annoying it is to try to collaborate with people whose platform of choice is GitHub.
Post this stuff on Twitter, or a mailing list, or a discussion board. Or at the very least, be productive and file a bug that says something like, "I wanted to express my gratitude for this project, but the README doesn't link to any public venues for general discussion". You know: things that at least attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate bugs? Or just don't do any of that and keep posting this sort of thing on GitHub--but in that case, please kindly also curb your and your colleagues' whinging in all future instances where you find that someone has chosen not to host on GitHub and, upon with being asked to, they say "no" and point to things like this as being among the reasons why GitHub users can't be trusted to make responsible use of project infrastructure.
I think the discussions feature might be a little more comfortable for more people to express gratitude, but like you said even that isn’t explicit enough. I also feel disinclined to post gratitude for fear it’ll register as noise.
IMO since GH tends to be somewhat aware of how people piggyback their platform, a README gratitude badge might be a good place to start. It can be as simple as a button click plus an optional prompt to add commentary. In fact, I might make this a smol project to see if it gets some traction.
Personally, a text area is the only thing I need to express my gratitude. I'm doubtful about a UI that would "encourage" it.
The last time I wrote on a GitHub issue, I started my message with a warm thankful line to the maintainer for his fabulous work. I meant it, and I didn't need any "reminder" to say so. It felt natural and important to me. I also put relevant informations to show my interest and the time I spent thinking about it. In the end, I believe it's more about the person posting, rather than the interface encouraging it, but I may be wrong.
I've found the 'heart' emoji on Github to be incredibly useful and also always a bit surprising. I'm taken aback by the expression of humanity alongside dry technical try-not-to-waste-someone's-time mumbo jumbo. But how else to express gratitude for someone being willing to volunteer their time on the never ending upgrade treadmill and long tail of bugs that haunt popular software?
This inspired me so I will find more time to do this as well. Went ahead and started at one of my favorite projects that I use across several professional and personal projects :)
A great reminder that showing a bit of gratitude goes a long way, especially to the the oftentimes-thankless builders and maintainers of the OSS we all rely on.
That's just a misconfiguration of the GitHub app I haven't gone around to fix yet. We certainly don't act on your behalf, we only check basic information.
I had that issue too when building something w/ GitHub auth. Instead of making your app a GitHub App, make it an OAuth App (which should only ask for profile data).
>On a wider note, my guess is that it would be healthy for the open source community at large to practice more gratitude.
I try my part to give kudos, where possible. Most of my kudos are around getting questions answered and problems solved, in venues like SO.
I tend to avoid using dependencies. When I do use them, I often try to share use cases, and spread the word.
The obverse, is that, when I find something to be unsuitable, or bad (in a totally subjective way), I generally don't bitch about it. I just leave it alone, and look for something else.
I am very hard on myself; but it isn't helpful for me to apply that to others.
A game developer released their game as open source after the Steam discovery algorithm killed traffic to their game [1]. It was nice to see a thank you on their GitHub [2], and I recommend people try to support developers with both gratitude, and when possible financially if it is a project that truly helps you.
The comment began with, "I just wanted to say thanks for the wonderful software." It made my day! The GitHub user interface should encourage this as a feature.
Taking this opportunity to say Thank you as well!
I've been using it for years on all of my machines, such a great piece of software, didn't expect to see it on here
I am glad you like Uncap. A comment like this provides good motivation to continue working on and maintaining an open source project in my free time. Thank you for posting this comment.
I've been on the receiving end of such gratitude, and it always brightens my day. It's easy to think your hard work isn't noticed, until you realize how seldom you acknowledge other people's work.
Unfortunately, explicit gratitude is very rare. Donations are even rarer. The "ask a question" and "support this site" buttons on my website are next to each other. I get 15 questions for every donation. About 30€ per 100 000 visitors, from 1-3 visitors. Those who email me with questions never donate. I'm not complaining about any of this, just illustrating my point: you can't use gratitude as a metric for the value of your work.
Critics, on the other hand, are disproportionately loud. As a community moderator, I learned that for every complainer, there are dozens of quietly happy users. You can only tell by the votes. No one will create a thread to say "everything is fine, keep it up".
If someone made your day easier, or if they created something good, take a minute to thank them. If they saved you a ton of work, consider a small donation. A lot of people are tirelessly, thanklessly creating things that benefit you. It costs nothing to acknowledge it. Never let a compliment go unused.
In the last few years, I became better at expressing my gratitude to creators, maintainers, colleagues and friends.
Can you ask them to? It's not exactly the same problem, but I have a modestly successful youtube channel, and I get unsolicited email questions seeking help every day, and I personally try and answer all that I can. I've used the following technique and it helped me receive donations to offset the support effort.
I added a quiet but clear call to action my support replies. It's in a smaller font and below the actual support reply, but it significantly increased the number of donations, and it helps offset my support time. I went from getting no donations, to donations on over 80% of the support questions I answer. Maybe this would work for you too.
Here is what I add at the bottom of help questions I receive:
----
As you might expect, I get a lot of requests for help. If you found my response helpful, a small donation for my time is totally optional, but appreciated so that I can continue to offer it as a service. http://buymeacoffee.com/boothjunkie
I've noticed something similar in my line of work.
One of the major "metrics" that we track is how much a customer has to put effort in to fix an issue/ticket. This is measured via a survey that's sent out after ticket closure, but many customers never see it or choise not to respond.
A few months ago, I started adding a little post script "A survey is sent out after this case closes. I would appreciate it if you answered it!". Response rates for the survey jumped from 11% to 75%. Many of the responses were generally positive as well, trending our scores up by 11% and still climbing.
Sometimes asking nicely is a powerful tool, for good and potentially evil.
The website already earns enough. Donations wouldn't make a big difference, so I don't feel comfortable directly asking for them. Nonetheless, I'll give it a try. Thank you for the suggestion!
The parent reply here is arguably just "priming" the reader to remember that donations are an appropriate way of showing thanks for the help. It's not that people are unwilling or unable to afford to give a donation (although some cannot), its more that they don't even consider it in the first place. A gentle reminder, even smaller and simpler than the above example, just prompts them to consider if they would donate.
I was going to say that I think people kind of build up an immunity or aversion to those sorts of requests as they become more common, but after some consideration there's a difference between individual vs mass communication in that regard.
Think of it this way. I really like donating to free software. But sometimes I have to actively hunt for a donation link. So in my opinion, it would be good to low-key advertise it whenever appropriate.
Also, while we're on the subject: I would love it, if free software came with a token product. For example: a "star" tier that shows up in your online profile, or something. This way, people can donate and make it into a business expense.
> No one will create a thread to say "everything is fine, keep it up".
I was lucky enough to receive a thread exactly like this [0], in response to a user complaining about my support response time [1]. Admittedly, it was in response to me saying "No-one ever writes threads like this", but it was still lovely to receive.
I just read that old complaint thread you linked to. Sorry you had to deal with that, and thank you for making software for all of us people, polite or not.
There was an attempt with https://saythanks.io/, however it doesn't offer a way to distinguish projects (so you get thank you notes but you don't know which project it's for) and they are not public. I'm sure something similar with more customization options would go a long way (even though the best you can hope for is that it dies when GitHub replaces it by a built-in option).
I once got a similar kind of thank-you issue from someone at Google who had used my project for a Cloud Next demo (with the link to the demo using my project!). It was probably the most gratifying and kind interaction I’ve had from open source. I would love it if GitHub had a separate feature for people to express their thanks. Makes me happy just thinking about it.
While I can't work for free, coworkers and managers stopping and saying, "I really appreciate what you've built; it makes my job easier" is what fuels me and makes me love my job.
It feels kind of childish but honestly, I just need some kind words every so often to let me know my work matters and is noticed.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadI humbly hope that sharing this might inspire more humanity and gratitude in the open source community.
I suspect one reason is because the cloud vendors push hard for layer 7 routing, and cloud managed cert management. (ie: ALB and ACM.) These have a lot of vendor lock-in, whereas k8s layer 4 ingress and cert-manager do not.
As an example, one of my most popular pages is a set of instructions on how to install 20 year old sewing machine software, that requires hardware keys, on modern Windows machines.
https://www.joeldare.com/wiki/installing_husqavarna_3d_embro...
I’m sure this will come in handy!
I think it's a really good idea to provide thanks and gratitude like this because I know its very validating and motivational for someone to reach out and just say thanks.
This should be especially true for more niche projects that gather less recognition but you can still find very useful.
[0]: https://github.com/geoffreylitt/simple_recommender/issues/7
This reminded me of an interesting year-ago SATA (Star And Thank Author) license:
https://github.com/zTrix/sata-license
This is also tracked as an open issue:
https://github.com/zTrix/sata-license/issues/5#issuecomment-...
I think that we (I include myself) are so wrapped up in our own struggles that we often fail to do the simplest things. Yes, one can't live on "thanks" alone, but we should offer gratitude more often.
As someone who occasionally gets thanked for my writing, it is great to know that some of my shouting into the void has actually helped a person.
It even helps the thanker: https://time.com/5026174/health-benefits-of-gratitude/
[0]: https://github.com/greg7mdp/sparsepp/issues/17
At the point this is a problem, you should get actual customer support people.
For example: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327
Also companies send you chocolates/swag (but not money) pretty often which is cool.
That said it is still very nice. I opened at least 10 such issues myself because they cost me nothing but a few seconds.
It’s also a big contrast to the toxic micro celebritism culture we often have.
Obviously it does not help much but I think this is a nice gesture and I wish more people did this.
(I haven't used it yet)
Concretely, you answered your own question. The "star" button is the default way of saying "thanks" to a project which was useful to you.
> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?
I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.
Not exactly, as star numbers are made public, meaning it's also a form of public approval.
In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.
I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with responding in any way, but still... And for any watcher, I imagine they are interested in notifications relevant to actual issues, not thank yous.
My opinion is the current best way to say thank you is probably a star. Beyond that, it would be nice if GitHub added a way to leave a thank you or testimonial or something like that. Or even a formal "the repo is in use by such and such app/company."
As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.
i'll second this.
post some screenshots of the thing you've made with my thing, or how it's improved the user experience or performance improvement metrics. what has my project unlocked for you, e.g. new use cases that were not possible before. compare it to what was there previously. i build open source stuff to scratch my own itches. knowing that it scratches the itches of 10k people instead of just 1 is the best outcome -- maximized impact.
just a thanks is nice but ultimately lowest effort and not that gratifying.
I've deliberately not opened "Thank you" issues, because I didn't want to annoy the owner/watchers. Certainly frustrating there is no way to express gratitude.
Unstar however would become “No thanks”
Star too, donate too, whatever you'd like to do normally too but nothing beats actually using your words
Github launched Github Sponsors in 2019. It does basically everything you described aside from the "thanks" part.
"No I said don't do th.. ah forget it"
1. If you just wanna thank them, write an email
2. If you want to do so publicly, do so on a public channel (e.g. Blog post, HN, youtube channel, etc)
#2 possibly won’t even be seen by the target.
Opening an issue is seen by the whole team and becomes a place for the community to weigh in. Seems ideal until Github provides better.
https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...
#2 can be combined with #1 to let them know
[0] https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html
I think this would be a nice new Category in Discussions; ":heart: Thank you"
The "hassle" of doing KYC at one of the exchanges and verifying your identity is only once. The benefit of being able to receive little cash for privacy-preserving ads and use it to contribute to a healthier digital economy can last for a long time.
Indeed! It must equally feel inappropriate to close a gratitude issue.
In person interaction naturally flows towards gratitude. Online interactions, like the one I’m having right now feels disposable. I don’t see your face and we can’t form much human connection.
This leads to an online world of shallow interactions that leave us feeling alone an empty. Much like what happens to people that live in large dense cities.
Our online interactions are so shallow, we feel it is the responsibility a product we are buying to facilitate a particular form of interaction as opposed to simply taking it upon ourselves to do it.
I do think there is a generational "thing" where older people tend to see online interactions as superficial and unreal, while younger people see them as a natural extension of the IRL social sphere. As a younger person, I find it easy to point out that interactions with strangers present similar difficulties whether online or IRL.
I just close the issue immediately after opening it. :)
I'm not sure that general purpose reviews/forums are the right way to address this issue, because those can generate negative feedback as easily as positive and generate additional stress for the maintainer. I think a simple dedicated "you can leave a public thank you message to the maintainer here if you want" text box would do the trick.
Or perhaps just a built-in "endorsement" feature, which companies can use to indicate that they use a project and find it valuable, perhaps listed on the sidebar. Could also segue into paid sponsorship and support.
Insofar as GitHub provides package management, they could also prompt companies to endorse the packages they use.
All of this might get annoying, nasty, or inauthentic, of course. Would need to be careful...
After all, Github is more like a Social Coding Platform.
Yes, because it is, but I'd dispute the claim that GitHub discourages it. If anything, the people who use GitHub are more willing/most likely to misuse bugtracker for not just support requests but also general discussion and comments like this. It seems like there's a (non) issue like this that gets linked at least once a month on HN. I click through, get annoyed with the person who opened it, read the maintainer's response, get annoyed with their endorsement/encouragement of the idea, close the window, and then file it away in my mind or my bookmarks or both as an example of how annoying it is to try to collaborate with people whose platform of choice is GitHub.
Post this stuff on Twitter, or a mailing list, or a discussion board. Or at the very least, be productive and file a bug that says something like, "I wanted to express my gratitude for this project, but the README doesn't link to any public venues for general discussion". You know: things that at least attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate bugs? Or just don't do any of that and keep posting this sort of thing on GitHub--but in that case, please kindly also curb your and your colleagues' whinging in all future instances where you find that someone has chosen not to host on GitHub and, upon with being asked to, they say "no" and point to things like this as being among the reasons why GitHub users can't be trusted to make responsible use of project infrastructure.
IMO since GH tends to be somewhat aware of how people piggyback their platform, a README gratitude badge might be a good place to start. It can be as simple as a button click plus an optional prompt to add commentary. In fact, I might make this a smol project to see if it gets some traction.
https://github.com/actionhero/node-resque/issues/496
I guess I’ll chime in and say - as an OSS maintainer, please flood my inbox with messages like this. It really makes my day!
Any and all feedback is welcome :)
* Verify your GitHub identity
* Know which resources you can access
* Act on your behalf
What does the last one mean, and why is it needed?
Edit: see https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/developers/a...
I try my part to give kudos, where possible. Most of my kudos are around getting questions answered and problems solved, in venues like SO.
I tend to avoid using dependencies. When I do use them, I often try to share use cases, and spread the word.
The obverse, is that, when I find something to be unsuitable, or bad (in a totally subjective way), I generally don't bitch about it. I just leave it alone, and look for something else.
I am very hard on myself; but it isn't helpful for me to apply that to others.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589545 [2] https://github.com/egordorichev/BurningKnight/issues/223
The comment began with, "I just wanted to say thanks for the wonderful software." It made my day! The GitHub user interface should encourage this as a feature.
> Did restic help you today? Did it make you happy in any way?
https://github.com/restic/restic/blob/master/.github/ISSUE_T...
Unfortunately, explicit gratitude is very rare. Donations are even rarer. The "ask a question" and "support this site" buttons on my website are next to each other. I get 15 questions for every donation. About 30€ per 100 000 visitors, from 1-3 visitors. Those who email me with questions never donate. I'm not complaining about any of this, just illustrating my point: you can't use gratitude as a metric for the value of your work.
Critics, on the other hand, are disproportionately loud. As a community moderator, I learned that for every complainer, there are dozens of quietly happy users. You can only tell by the votes. No one will create a thread to say "everything is fine, keep it up".
If someone made your day easier, or if they created something good, take a minute to thank them. If they saved you a ton of work, consider a small donation. A lot of people are tirelessly, thanklessly creating things that benefit you. It costs nothing to acknowledge it. Never let a compliment go unused.
In the last few years, I became better at expressing my gratitude to creators, maintainers, colleagues and friends.
Can you ask them to? It's not exactly the same problem, but I have a modestly successful youtube channel, and I get unsolicited email questions seeking help every day, and I personally try and answer all that I can. I've used the following technique and it helped me receive donations to offset the support effort.
I added a quiet but clear call to action my support replies. It's in a smaller font and below the actual support reply, but it significantly increased the number of donations, and it helps offset my support time. I went from getting no donations, to donations on over 80% of the support questions I answer. Maybe this would work for you too.
Here is what I add at the bottom of help questions I receive:
----
As you might expect, I get a lot of requests for help. If you found my response helpful, a small donation for my time is totally optional, but appreciated so that I can continue to offer it as a service. http://buymeacoffee.com/boothjunkie
One of the major "metrics" that we track is how much a customer has to put effort in to fix an issue/ticket. This is measured via a survey that's sent out after ticket closure, but many customers never see it or choise not to respond.
A few months ago, I started adding a little post script "A survey is sent out after this case closes. I would appreciate it if you answered it!". Response rates for the survey jumped from 11% to 75%. Many of the responses were generally positive as well, trending our scores up by 11% and still climbing.
Sometimes asking nicely is a powerful tool, for good and potentially evil.
If I get that in the midst of solving the problem I always click - if the survey comes hours or days late I may not make the effort.
Also, while we're on the subject: I would love it, if free software came with a token product. For example: a "star" tier that shows up in your online profile, or something. This way, people can donate and make it into a business expense.
When I see 'support' on a website I think tech support not money support and blank it if I'm not looking for support. Might be just me, course!
I was lucky enough to receive a thread exactly like this [0], in response to a user complaining about my support response time [1]. Admittedly, it was in response to me saying "No-one ever writes threads like this", but it was still lovely to receive.
0. https://groups.google.com/g/cursive/c/Zw8JExDavrE/m/HDILSRCj...
1. https://groups.google.com/g/cursive/c/wZOjmj2Jits/m/Iu7_6iuD...
It feels kind of childish but honestly, I just need some kind words every so often to let me know my work matters and is noticed.
https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/discussions