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About discussions

Use discussions to ask and answer questions, share information, make announcements, and conduct or participate in a conversation about a project.

About GitHub Discussions

GitHub Discussions allows your project's community to engage in conversations about the project's direction and future in an open-ended format. Maintainers, contributors, and visitors can gather in a central location, without third-party tools.

  • Share announcements and information
  • Plan and make decisions with community input
  • Encourage and answer questions, and mark them answered as you respond to them
  • Gauge community opinion using polls

Screenshot of the "Discussions" page for a repository, showing a list of discussions such as "Feedback on the new layout" and "Project direction".

You can use repository discussions to discuss topics that are specific to one repository and organization discussions for broader conversations that span multiple repositories.

Anyone with access to a repository or organization can create and participate in discussions there. However, an administrator must enable GitHub Discussions for the repository or organization first.

Managing discussions

GitHub Discussions includes tools for managing discussions, and for using discussions to manage the repository or organization.

  • Pin discussions to give topics more visibility
  • Mark comments as answers in question-and-answer categories to help users find information more quickly
  • Lock discussions that have reached a conclusion or become too heated
  • Convert open-ended issues into discussions
  • Close discussions that are no longer useful

Discussions are opened in user-defined categories, and can be further organized with repository labels. For more information about discussion management, see Managing discussions.

Sharing feedback

You can share your feedback about GitHub Discussions with GitHub. To join the conversation, see GitHub Community discussions.

Next steps

If you're ready to try GitHub Discussions, get started at Quickstart for GitHub Discussions.