Why is discussions here and not on the VSCode repository?

[shoulders]

Does anyone know why these discussions are separate to the main VSCode repository?

Thanks

[oldregime]

The VS Code team maintains discussions in a separate repository for several reasons:

1. Volume management: The main VS Code repository (microsoft/vscode) is one of the most active repositories on GitHub with tens of thousands of issues. Keeping discussions separate helps maintain clarity and organization.

2. Different purposes: The main repo focuses on bug reports and feature requests through issues, while this repository is dedicated to community Q&A, extension development help, and general discussions.

3. Easier moderation: Having a dedicated discussions repo allows for specialized moderation and category management tailored to discussion topics rather than code issues.

4. Reduced noise: It prevents discussion threads from cluttering the issue tracker where developers need to focus on bugs and features.

This is a common pattern for large open-source projects. You can find similar setups in other Microsoft projects like TypeScript and many other popular repositories.

Hope this helps clarify!

[shoulders]

Volume management: The main VS Code repository (microsoft/vscode) is one of the most active repositories on GitHub with tens of thousands of issues. Keeping discussions separate helps maintain clarity and organization.

I disagree. The reason there is not much activity on vscode-discussions is that no-one knows it is there.

Different purposes: The main repo focuses on bug reports and feature requests through issues, while this repository is dedicated to community Q&A, extension development help, and general discussions.

The tabs denote different purposes. On the vscode repo the discussion tab does not exists and on vscode-discussions only the discussion tab is used. So different purposes is not valid for this.

Easier moderation: Having a dedicated discussions repo allows for specialized moderation and category management tailored to discussion topics rather than code issues.

This does not make any difference if the repo is dead/low traffic

Reduced noise: It prevents discussion threads from cluttering the issue tracker where developers need to focus on bugs and features.

Use categories in the discussions tab.

thanks