Improving Thread Organization and Discoverability in GitHub Discussions

[fahadijutt04-hue]

Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Discussion Content

Hi GitHub team and community,

I’ve been exploring GitHub Discussions across different repositories and organizations, and I really appreciate how it centralizes conversations within projects.

I wanted to share some feedback and ask a question regarding thread organization and discoverability.

As discussions grow larger, especially in active repositories, it can sometimes become challenging to:

Quickly identify high-value threads

Filter discussions beyond basic categories

Track long-term evolving conversations

Distinguish between outdated and currently relevant answers

Are there any plans to introduce more advanced filtering options, such as:

Sorting by engagement quality (not just activity)

Better tagging hierarchies

Archiving stale discussions automatically

Visual indicators for recently updated but older threads

I believe improving discoverability would significantly enhance the experience for both maintainers and contributors, especially in large open-source communities.

Would love to hear how others manage growing discussion boards, and whether there are recommended best practices for keeping Discussions organized long term.

Thanks for building and maintaining this feature!

[Ibrahim-sayys]

Great points raised here, this really captures one of the biggest growing pains of successful projects: conversations scaling faster than organization.

One thing I’ve noticed in large repositories is that Discussions often start strong as knowledge hubs but slowly drift into mixed timelines of solved, outdated, and ongoing threads. Without stronger signals, newcomers can struggle to tell what’s still relevant versus what’s just historically popular.

I particularly like the idea of engagement-quality sorting rather than pure activity metrics. Sometimes the most useful answers aren’t the most recent, they’re the ones that actually solved the problem well.

Another improvement that could help is a lightweight maintainer signal system
for example:
• Marking discussions as still relevant
• Flagging accepted answers that remain valid after updates
• Or surfacing community-endorsed summaries at the top of long threads

Curious how others handle this today, do maintainers periodically curate discussions, or is this mostly left to organic community behavior?

Really appreciate you bringing this up. Better discoverability here could make Discussions evolve from a conversation tool into a long-term knowledge base.