On the Web, the github.com/*/*/issues namespace is home to the worst bugtracker behavior in the world. A bugtracker should should be restricted to bug reports and (well-informed) proposals and discussion about the bug/bugfix. The bug report should contain, at minimum and at maximum:

1. Clear steps to reproduce (ideally, using the prepared testcase as input, if applicable)

2. A description of the behavior observed from the program

3. A description of the expected behavior

4. Optionally, your justification for why the program should be changed to behave the way described in #3 and not #4

Everything else belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media.

But this is all totally foreign to, like, 80% of GitHub's userbase (including the majority of the project managers aka maintainers who are in charge of allowing/disallowing the sorts of things that people post as a way of shaping the tone and tenor of the space).

> Everything else belongs on a message board, mailing list, or social media.

There's a reason that collaborative code platform (not just GH but also GL) "issues" end up being used for much more than bugs:

- message boards suffer from the SSO friction issue. No thanks I will not sign up at some phpBB board of questionable admin quality that will get 0wned sooner than later, or have the board owner bombard me with advertising themselves.

- mailing lists are even worse usability-wise because these by design leak your email address, on top of that their management UI often enough is Mailman which means it probably still stores passwords in cleartext, and spam filters, attachment size limits and overeager virus scanners make it a living hell

- IRC suffers from context loss. Netsplit, go for a smoke and the laptop goes to sleep, whoops, you disconnected and don't see what happened in the meantime. Yes, there's bouncers, but honestly, the UX sucks hard. Also, no file transfers to a channel, no native screenshot/paste functionality.

- Discord, Slack etc. solve the pains of IRC but are walled gardens

- Social media... yikes. No, no, no. Eventually, people that follow both you and the author of some FOSS software get pissed off by your conversation spamming their feed. (Too) many are still only active on Twitter which excludes people who don't want to be on that hellsite. Bluesky, good luck finding non-commies there. Mastodon, good luck and pray that your instance operator and the instance operator of the project team didn't end up in some bxtchfight escalating in defederation. Facebook groups, not everyone wants to leak their real name.

- messenger groups (especially Telegram)... blergh. You will drown in spam.

GH/GL are the sweet spot between UX/SO friction (because pretty much everyone who would want to file an issue has an account) and features, and on top of that both platforms have deals with email providers preventing them from getting blocked. That's why these two platforms are so far superior above everything else mentioned.