Introducing new organization-wide issue templates

[peterjokumsen]

Introducing new organization-wide issue templates and poking ChatGPT for inspiration

I have created new issue templates for the organization that will be used in all repositories that do not have their own templates.

These templates use GitHub forms to get initial information from the user who is creating the issue.

Screens

Create new issue display

This is the screen that will be shown when you try to create a new issue, there are 3 templates in place:

• Bug Report
• Feature Request
• Security Report

The other option is a link to the organization Discussions.

I've set blank_issues_enabled to true in the config to allow users the option to create a new issue from scratch, which can be seen as the hyperlink at the bottom of the screen

Using GitHub forms

This is the form displayed to get user input for a Feature Request.

The journey to create these issue templates

Creating the issue templates for the organization involved the following steps:

• Reading up on creating a code of conduct for the organization
• Discovering the existence of issue and pull request templates
• Attempting to create them
• Successfully creating a pull request template (which still needs some work)
• Struggling to get the issue templates to work
• Continuing work on other projects
• Creating many issues as a reminder that templates were not being applied
• Finally snapping and starting to research the issue template problem in depth
• Consulting various online resources, including a quasi-stackoverflow GitHub Discussion question that matched my problem
• Realizing that the issue templates were in the wrong folder
• Moving the files and adjusting them
• Seeking input from ChatGPT, a chatbot, on fun and engaging bug/feature/security templates
• Using the provided markdown to update the templates in the chill-viking/.github repository
• Researching the expected syntax of the title: property
• Discovering the concept of issue forms and deciding to use them instead of having users manually adjust the automatically provided markdown
• Researching the requirements for using issue forms
• Adjusting an example issue form to match the copy provided by ChatGPT
• Discovering an interesting property used in an example form
• Researching the possible values for the property
• Finding the Syntax for GitHub Form Schema documentation
• Asking ChatGPT for the templates in yaml format
• Receiving the templates in yaml format with a note to make the file extension .yml
• Updating the config.yml file to include the issue template (although it is not clear if this was necessary)
• Making these four commits to finalize the changes
  • Bulk of the change
  • Fix an oopsie in Feature Request template
  • Fix an oopsie in security report
  • Add icon to discussion name to match other issue options

That's all for now

What do you think of the templates?

Let me know if I missed anything. Pretty sure I have because on preview, the original sentence was Let me know if you I missed anything. 🤪

More ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT to proofread and give back suggestions for this discussion, which gave me some very good notes and insights, which ended with:

In the final paragraph, you might consider rephrasing the sentence "Let me know if I missed anything. Pretty sure I have because on preview, the original sentence was Let me know if you I missed anything. 🤪" to be more clear and concise. You could say something like "Please let me know if I missed anything in this post. I noticed that the original sentence was accidentally written as Let me know if you I missed anything, so I wanted to make sure everything is correct."

I feel that is an excellent suggestion!

In the future I will be applying notes directly instead of displaying them so candidly 😉

Have a great one

[peterjokumsen]

The section for The journey to create these issues was originally this

The crazy journey to get here

This took a surprising amount of research to pull off...

• Started with reading up on creating a code of conduct for the organization
• Found out about issue templates and pull request templates
• Attempted to create them
• Pull request template worked (which still needs some work)
• Issue templates were not working...
• Moved on to other things
• Created a lot of issues as a persistent reminder that templates were not being applied
• Finally, I snapped when I wanted to make a new issue tonight
• Much googling, without much luck... although in my second result, I did skip over point 7 of Creating a repository for default files
• Eventually landed on a quasi-stackoverflow GitHub Discussion question that matched my problem
• I had put the issue templates in the wrong folder
• Moved the files and decided to adjust them
• Had a chat with ChatGPT
• Asked it (them?) for fun and engaging bug/feature/security templates, which gave me great markdown to use
• Started updating the markdown for chill-viking/.github repository
• Looked into what the expected syntax of title: property did, i.e. [BUG] (turns out it's just a placeholder for user to manually edit, was hoping for some form of input that would auto-populate it...)
• That google session was also long and fraught with false positives
• Ended up finding out about Issue forms... wanted it instead of having users manually adjust automatically provided markdown
• More googling to find what's needed for it
• Found examples of Issue forms, started adjusting example to match copy provided by ChatGPT
• Found an interesting property used in an example
• More googling to find out what are possibly values for the property
• 3 steps into a google result, finally found Syntax for GitHub Form Schema
• During my googling tried asking ChatGPT about providing the templates as a form
• ChatGPT gave me the same markdown just with additional metadata
• Asked for the markdown in yaml
• ChatGPT provided the same contents with additional note to make its extension .yml
• BUT it also included a useful note to update config.yml to include the issue template (Which I'm not sure is necessary, but did it anyway)
• 3 commits later, initial commit for most of the changes and then 2 commits to fix some issues, and here we are 🎊🎉

Thank you for joining my TED Talk, or crazy early morning rant about this stuff.