Devs complain GitHub's become slow to fix bugs, is easily gamed

Open letter calls on site to be more responsive and accelerate own development

More than 1,100 maintainers of GitHub projects have put their names to an open letter expressing frustration that the famous software hub is ignoring them.

Their letter, here, centres on what they say is inadequate support.

“We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them,” the letter states.

Their key complaints are:

• Issues getting filed with no content, because GitHub lacks any kind of mandatory issues template;
• Upvoting isn't controlled, so issues accumulate spam in the form of “+1”s that don't add any information;
• It's too easy to ignore contribution guidelines when creating issues and pull requests.

“We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!”, the letter continues.

Names on the summary of signatories include Dave Methvin (maintainer of jQuery), Feross Aboukhadijeh (WebTorrent), Jesus Rodriguez (ui-bootstrap), and, as they say in the classics, many, many more. ®