zipkin-support repo for troubleshooting questions

[Adrian Cole]

Hi, all.

You know we don't use issues for questions on our github repo, have
templates setup to mention this.
https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/tree/master/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE

The basic idea is to stop spamming issues list, as quite often the
questions are on the wrong repo anyway. The back and forth of
troubleshooting can cause much more traffic than actual change, and
this reduces the signal on already very active projects.

For reasons including ESL, folks delete our templates and raise issues
for troubleshooting anyway. We take time to redirect people to gitter
etc manually when this happens, and try to remember to mark issues
like this as question:
https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/issues?q=label%3Aquestion+

There are some places where gitter doesn't work. For example, some
refuse the authorizations gitter asks for, and those reasons can be
valid. Another is that few look at other channels like our mailing
list or StackOverflow. Some things like continuity of a problem may be
helpful to use a richer medium to support. For example, pasting images
is really helpful in ESL, and searching github is easier than
searching gitter. Finally, issues have a means to resolve and some
support requests are resolvable. In gitter it is up to folks to
follow-up and/or just keep asking.

Between when we setup this process and now, Github supports
transferring issues to a different repo. If we setup a new repo, like
zipkin-support, we can transfer the chattier issues there, and get a
better sense if the questions are resolved or not. Also, we can have
better tagging about correlated issues.

It won't be perfect though.. For example, many times people open
issues about spring-cloud-sleuth and we can't transfer across orgs.
However, we can still move issues like this into a repo and tag it as
spring-cloud-sleuth. Stats on tags can help us drive anything in our
control to reduce confusion.

I proposed that we add a zipkin-support repo on gitter, and folks
agreed so far. Unless there's a disagreement in the next 3 days, I'll
go ahead and create that repo and move all of our "question" issues to
it.

Meanwhile, feel free to give feedback or opinions... they are welcome!

-A

[Adrian Cole]

https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin-support

anyone bored can start using the transfer issue button :)