Trial GitHub discussions as an alternative/replacement to Google Groups

[jay0lee]

Today a huge amount of GAM commuity discussion happens in the git.io/gam-group Google Group. However we've seen various issues with Spam, false positive blocks on legit group users (often those contributing the most get blocked) and the UI / UX leave something to be desired in 2025.

On a trial basis, I've enabled GitHub Discusisons: https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM/discussions

The goal is to evaluate the discussion features and consider it as an alternative community management system and even possible replacement to the group (we'd likely keep both active for some time before moving over fully).

No decisions have been made yet and this is only for testing but a few thoughts:

• Discussions integrates closer with GitHub code, issues, etc. It should make it easier to link to / move a discussion into an issue, etc.
• Groups uses Google account login which 100% of GAM users should already have setup. It's not clear how many GAM users have a GitHub login or if creating / using one proves to be a barrier for them.
• The groups user interface and general user experience is looking rather dated in 2025. Discussions offers a better UI and features like categories, "most helpful" responses, etc.
• I suspect many GAM users consume the GAM group discussion via their mail Inbox, not the groups UI. We need to understand what that experience would look like for Discussions (can you subscribe to everything, etc).

[brandonbeaudette]

Issues are geared to the dev ops side of things. I can see how this would help track bugs and features but not so much the how-to questions, which seem to occupy most of the Group chat.

[jay0lee]

The idea is that sometimes questions are actually the result of issues/bugs and it's not uncommon to have a discussion linked to an issue.

The deeper integration between the two on GitHub provides better linking and thus better overall context.