Ghostty Blocks Direct Issue Creation on GitHub

The Ghostty project has disabled direct issue creation on its GitHub repository. Instead of filing bugs through the standard GitHub interface, users are being directed to a specific discussion thread on Hacker News to submit their feedback and reports.

This unusual approach aims to centralize community feedback and manage the high volume of input more effectively. By funneling discussions through a single channel, the project maintainers can better track, prioritize, and respond to user concerns. The policy has generated significant discussion within the developer community, with the primary conversation taking place on the designated Hacker News thread. This strategy reflects a deliberate choice to handle community engagement differently than typical open-source projects.

The Ghostty organization has explicitly disabled the ability for users to create new issues directly on its GitHub repository. This configuration change means that the "New Issue" button typically found on GitHub repositories is not available for the Ghostty project. Users attempting to report bugs or request features through GitHub are instead met with a policy that redirects them elsewhere.

The project has established a specific workflow for all feedback. Rather than creating individual GitHub tickets, the community is instructed to participate in a centralized discussion. This method consolidates all initial feedback into one location, preventing the immediate fragmentation of reports across multiple, isolated issue threads. The primary goal is to capture a broad range of user experiences and technical problems in a structured manner before they are formally logged as development tasks.

The designated venue for all Ghostty feedback is a single thread on Hacker News. This platform, known for its tech-focused community, serves as the official channel for users to report issues and share their thoughts. The project maintainers are actively monitoring this thread to gather data on user experiences, identify common problems, and understand feature requests.

By using Hacker News as the primary feedback portal, the project leverages a platform with built-in voting and discussion features. This allows the most critical or popular feedback to naturally rise to the top, giving the maintainers a clear signal of what issues affect the most users. The discussion thread serves as a living document of community sentiment and technical hurdles, which can be referenced and organized by the development team as they plan future updates and fixes.

The decision to route feedback through Hacker News has become a topic of discussion on the platform itself. The specific thread identified for feedback has accumulated comments and points, indicating active engagement from the community. This meta-discussion involves users debating the merits and drawbacks of this unconventional approach to issue tracking.

Some community members have expressed that this method is an efficient way to handle the initial flood of feedback for a new and popular project. Others may question whether it is a sustainable long-term solution compared to traditional issue trackers. The conversation provides a real-time pulse on how the user base perceives the project's management and communication strategies. The level of engagement, measured in comments and points, reflects a community that is invested in the project's direction and success.

This strategy represents a significant deviation from standard open-source project management. Most projects rely on GitHub Issues to create a searchable, trackable, and permanent record of bugs and enhancements. By centralizing feedback externally, the Ghostty team is adopting a more curated and manual process for triaging incoming reports.

For the maintainers, this approach reduces the immediate noise of duplicate or low-quality reports that often flood new repositories. It allows them to engage directly with user feedback in a conversational format before formalizing it into a development task. However, it also places a heavier burden on the team to manually parse, categorize, and eventually migrate information from the discussion thread into a structured system. This trade-off prioritizes initial community engagement and quality control over the convenience of automated issue tracking.