Stop linking to issues/new

You have a neat software project. This project has a presence on GitHub. Maybe you host the source code there, maybe you’re just leveraging the issue tracker.

Your project also has a website. You know that your users will have problems with your software, so you want to direct them from your website to your issue tracker. You want them to have the most streamlined experience possible, so you get the bright idea of linking to issues/new. How convenient! One click, and they’re able to start writing a report immediately! Except, that isn’t what happens.

Ugh. Don’t assume my intentions. All you had to do was link to the issue page. It’s not like opening a new issue from there is hard.

Other reasons why you may not want to do this:

• Non-GitHub users are stonewalled from even viewing your tracker without backtracking to find an alternate route.
• A user wants to check for an existing issue before submitting their own. Have you been noticing a lot of duplicates?

If you are going to pull this stunt, maybe you could at least link to the issue tracker at the same time?

Have a problem with this blog? Submit a new issue, or view all of them. See? That wasn’t so hard.