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Communicating on GitHub

In this article

You can discuss specific projects and changes, as well as broader ideas or team goals, using different types of discussions on GitHub Enterprise Server.

Introduction

GitHub Enterprise Server provides built-in collaborative communication tools allowing you to interact closely with your community. This quickstart guide will show you how to pick the right tool for your needs.

You can create and participate in issues, pull requests, GitHub Discussions, and team discussions, depending on the type of conversation you'd like to have.

GitHub Issues

  • are useful for discussing specific details of a project such as bug reports, planned improvements and feedback.
  • are specific to a repository, and usually have a clear owner.
  • are often referred to as GitHub's bug-tracking system.

Pull requests

  • allow you to propose specific changes.
  • allow you to comment directly on proposed changes suggested by others.
  • are specific to a repository.

Team discussions

  • can be started on your team's page for conversations that span across projects and don't belong in a specific issue or pull request. Instead of opening an issue in a repository to discuss an idea, you can include the entire team by having a conversation in a team discussion.
  • allow you to hold discussions with your team about planning, analysis, design, user research and general project decision making in one place.
  • provide a collaborative experience outside the codebase, allowing the brainstorming of ideas.
  • often don’t have a clear owner.
  • often do not result in an actionable task.

Which discussion tool should I use?

Scenarios for issues

  • I want to keep track of tasks, enhancements and bugs.
  • I want to file a bug report.
  • I want to share feedback about a specific feature.
  • I want to ask a question about files in the repository.

Issue example

This example illustrates how a GitHub user created an issue in our documentation open source repository to make us aware of a bug, and discuss a fix.