GitHub offers several products, for example, GitHub Free, GitHub Pro, GitHub Enterprise, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud. These products not only offer different features, they also differ from each other with regards to what you and the community can do and see. Nevertheless, everybody just talks about GitHub and most of the time that's fine if the context is clear.
All those different GitHub platforms look very similar. So it's no surprise that sometimes, when users follow a link to github.com, they are not aware that they are on a public platform. We thought a lot about how we can make this more obvious without complicating the overall collaboration process for the Open Documentation Initiative.
Well, here's the simple solution: Since last week, our new GitHub templates are live for issues and pull requests. Let's start with pull requests, where a short comment gives you a heads-up that you're working on a public platform:
For issues, GitHub has been offering YAML-based templates for a while. With those, we could have created a long form with radio buttons, text boxes, and checkboxes, that nobody would have wanted to fill out. Instead, we only added one optional list box after the issue description where reporters can classify the issue by themselves if they want to:
The last two fields are prefilled to tell us from what SAP Help Portal page you came from. Previously, the page title was copied over to the issue title, but now you can use your own issue title to describe the problem, for example, something like: "Parameter in step 4 doesn't work".
Please comment if you have any feedback with regards to the new templates.
Cheers,
Jens
