Developers expressed their frustration to GitHub in an open letter wherein they complained about how their requests are being ignored.
The group added that whenever they tried to reach out through the support channel, they either receive a blank reply or none at all.
"We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them," reads the letter signed by GitHub users. "Since our own work is usually done in the open and everyone has input into the process, it seems strange for us to be in the dark about one of our most important project dependencies."
GitHub is a Git repository hosting service that provides a Web-based graphical interface. Other features that it provides include access control and a number of collaboration features with basic tools for task management and wikis for every project.
GitHub now has a huge community of over 12 million people and has more than 31 million projects that were discovered, used and contributed by developers through a collaborative project development workflow.
"You can integrate GitHub with third party tools, from project management to continuous deployment, to build software in the way that works best for you," says GitHub.
In the open letter, the developers said that they feel frustrated because GitHub seemed like it is not addressing the obvious flaws in the platform. Moreover, they also feel frustrated about not getting even the slightest response to their feedback.
Some of the projects that the developers are currently maintaining include Meteor, Grunt, Bootstrap, Ember.js, jQuery, Node.js and more.
There are at least three major issues that the group pointed out in the letter. They also added some of the ideas which they believe would be the best way in addressing the issues.
First, the group said that some crucial information such as version tested or reproduction steps are missing.
"We'd like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism for ensuring they are filled out in every issue," wrote the group.
Next, there seemed to be an accumulation of content-less "+1" comments, which cause maintainers and others to be vulnerable to spam.
To solve it, the group asked for a first-class voting system that will trigger a warning mechanism and voting know-how.
Lastly, the group expressed how issues and pull requests seemed to be created with no adherence to the contribution guidelines stated in CONTRIBUTING.md.
They suggested that maintainers should find a way of configuring a file in the repository, and then either inline content, link to pages or both.
