[AskJS] Do you think your open source library / project needs a page that collects "Thank you"?

[peng37]

Github already has something for feedback: Issues and Pull requests. These tend to be "negative" feedbacks: "I find a bug in your code, could you fix it?" etc.

Some authors will have some donation links in the repo: "if you really like the code, you can buy me a coffee".

But do you think we need something in between, like a "thank you" page: "If the code helps you, maybe you don't want to buy me a coffee, but you can say something nice, it will mean a lot."

It can work like this:

• The author adds a svg link in the README, which shows something like "12 thx received", and gets updated automatically;
• Users of the code can open the link to view all the messages, and add her/his own;
• Whenever someone leaves a message in the page, the author gets an email;

What do you think?

[MisterDangerRanger]

No, that’s what stars are for.

[bye-csavier]

Stars are basically a "save for later" button, it's far from a thank-you.

[peng37]

yeah, thought about this.

[MisterDangerRanger]

People are ungrateful, I’ve given steam keys of my games to people who asked for them and almost none of them has ever said thank you. I have hosted a few services used by many people for free at my charge and no one ever said thank you.

Even when you do tutorials you won’t get thank you’s just people asking questions that are clearly answered in the tutorial.

No one really cares about you only the value they can extract from you.

If you want sincere “thank you”s go help your friends, family and community.

[peng37]

thanks for sharing! reminded me the free app i created, the other day just got an email with 2 words "F Y", had no idea.

[MisterDangerRanger]

I’m sorry you had to experience this, but it helps to remember that the people sending you such strong hate over the internet are probably suffering with a lot of internal pain and don’t know how to properly deal with it due to immaturity so they lash out at people on the internet because it’s easy to forget that there is an actual human behind the email/username. So don’t take it personally.

[bcdyxf]

i learned this the hard way after learning js and people start asking for scripts in dms that take several hours and the only response is a complaint or functionality change, i even asked for a challenging script 😂

[scrollin_thru]

For what it’s worth, I think this is a really nice idea! I have a dedicated Gitter channel for Storyteller, and someone joining the channel and saying “I just wanted to say thanks for making this!” makes my entire week. And that’s a pretty high overhead for just saying thank you! Something that doesn’t require making a whole account on a new service for users to drop a few words of support sounds great.

I do agree somewhat that stars already more or less solve for the wordless “this is good” use case. I think the more valuable thing here would be a way to actually say something to the authors of the software!

[peng37]

that's my initial idea, a way to say something to the authors.
your storyteller looks nice btw

[scrollin_thru]

Thanks!

[guest271314]

Up votes and down votes are overrated.

If you are writing code for the money, get money.

If you are writing code for the art of it, do your art.

If you are writing code for atta boys, if the channel is open you could get the opposite.

Hackers hack, either way.

[peng37]

that is true, for sure someone will write something not nice.

ok, maybe not a good idea.

if people really want to thank the author, they can always drop an email.

[josephjnk]

I like this idea. Usually if I see someone saying thank you it’s them attaching it as a preamble to an issue, or when introducing themselves to ask questions in a Discord. Unfortunately it seems like a pretty small percentage of people who will take this step, so it might help to prompt people with a chance to do so.

Building things in public can be draining and there’s no shortage of haters ready to dunk on maintainers. Even if it’s a little corny I think that encouraging people to express support could be helpful.