It's hard to believe but one out of every 3 programmers experience this daily...

You publish a little Gist, maybe the 3rd or 10th this week and you forget about it. It's just there so you have a record of some idea or cool way to solve a problem.

Fast forward - two years later...

You're looking through your gists, laughing at some of the code your old, stupid self wrote two years ago... then you see it... That little gist you published two years ago and completely forgot about... It's been starred a surprising amount of times and there's quite a few comments on there. Lets take a looksie at what people are saying about that old piece of silly spaghetti...

 HOLY @&^%$%*!!!  It's a comment by @MarkZuckerberg!!!

...He is very impressed by your gist and would personally like to extend an invitation for you to lead a developer team at Facebook... he needs to fill the position by next week... he really hope's this @mention reaches you well...

Aggghhhhh... commented 1 year and 4 months ago!?!?!?!

 

If you are troubled by this, take action and email support@github.com explaining that you won't tolerate any more suffering of programmers who weren't notified about job offers from Mark Zuckerberg in comments and mentions on their Gists.

Here's a template you can use by @matt-curtis:

Subject: Feature Request - Notifications for Comments & Mentions in Gists

Hello Github,

As you know, Gists are often used to share tiny code snippets and such that don't quite warrant a full-on repo. Gists also have a commenting feature, which is great for sharing information about what works and what doesn't, asking for help, or just general discussion.

Not being able to receive notifications for mentions and comments on Gists is a huge drawback and oversight. It makes collaboration more difficult and lessens the usefulness of commenting on Gists at all.. It's way too easy for important mentions and comments to go unnoticed for long periods of time (possibly forever!).

There's currently an Issue for this problem here, with over 200 supporters at the time of writing. Please consider implementing this feature - your users would highly appreciate it.

Thanks,
[Your Name]

 

Github's Jess will probably respond with:

Hi @GithubUser,

Thanks for getting in touch. Yeah, I agree that would be a great thing for gists -- it's something the team has been considering. I can't make any promises, but I'll definitely let them know you'd also like to see a gist comment notification feature added.

Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you!

Cheers,
Jess

If that happens, don't be discouraged! Eventually Jess will get tired of sending this same response template and maybe let someone know about the gist comment notification feature.

Inspired by this github issue.

#MAKEGITHUBGREATAGAIN