Taylor Otwell Asked the Community About Their Experience Contributing To Laravel

Taylor created a feedback thread on Reddit asking the community on why they do not contribute as well as asking for suggestions on how to manage issues.

Taylor said in the thread, “One thing that has been bothering me is I have seen a few people say they don’t contribute to Laravel because it seems like PRs get closed or shot down without much explanation. It’s hard to tell how many people are actually experiencing this issue. However, even a few cases is something that really bothers me and I want to improve.”

Taylor continues, “My biggest challenge is the “Issues” tab on GitHub. It gets a lot of activity and its hard to filter out genuine issues from support requests, configuration problems, general questions, etc”.

The responses included a lot of honest feedback and many mentioned that the way Graham closes issues is a big turn off and one of the primary reasons people are reluctant to contribute. At the same time, he contributes a lot to the framework and knows a lot about PHP, Composer, and the whole ecosystem.

Taylor took the blame for the way the issues and pull requests have been handled. “I have been asking Graham to manage issues when really I think he shines best in other areas of contribution. We can make some changes where Graham can still contribute in a very valuable way, just perhaps not as the only person doing front-line issue support, which is probably better suited for a team of people that is more gifted with “customer support” type skills.”

As the framework grows and matures hitting growing pains like this is inevitable, and to help make contributing better for everyone they are going to try and expand the number of people who help triage the issues. This way it will help prevent burnout and have more eyes and minds on what is coming in.