I think it is a bit painful for the need to divide input between two platforms. It creates a cause for people to be weary about their thoughts and enforces an amount needless policing. When a new contributor comes by and enters feedback into GitHub it is likely to become a lashing rather than taking the information seriously. The strategy should be to utilize issue tagging and assume that any good discussion could eventually lead to a pull request which could close it. Nothing should ever be closed immediately, it should only be marked as discussion and only ever closed when some sort of consensus is reached.
It would be best if “talk.commonmark.org” was a layer on top of the GitHub API that cataloged issues which were tagged as discussion. Any new Topic added to “talk.commonmark.org” would be automatically added to GitHub in a properly tagged state. Depending on the permissions allowed to OAUTH it should be possible. This would allow you to easily put together milestones and start growing a cohesive workflow.
The discussion site should also be enabled with the ranking feature that Reddit and Hacker News use. The patten itself is very well understood. If done properly you could get quite a number of quality open-source projects going under the “CommonMark” name. Why not distill that pattern into something very reusable.
If you wanted to go even crazier you could store all GitHub discussions as JSON objects and ensure that there is a two way syncing between GitHub and the talk.commonmark.org service. You could even work on a JSON schema with the express purpose of defining a discussion. Really work to discover what the best pattern really is by asking the community. This would also allow you to also keep the comments in version control. As users modify things you could ensure that a history is always backed up so that no one can sneak a change in without others being able to alter their arguments to reflect the difference.
Who knows it may stop 70 mile long discussions from occurring if users are more encouraged to just work away on their own unique arguments. To be honest a good deal of any discussion tends to be an oddly passive aggressive song and dance as people just pick apart points of a bigger picture. Kind of like animals at times really… but you always know the strongest wins. Why not just let it be the best argument that wins in each discussion.
I think it could help clear up a considerable number of redundant issues and harness the community in a much better way. If done right it could be a very useful project for any GitHub repo. It could even start to influence the way that GitHub deals with comments in the first place. Or even better, the standard it uses to parse Markdown in the first place.
I am also a bit sad that the code for talk.commonmark.org is not available at https://github.com/commonmark
This is also posted on GitHub here… https://github.com/jgm/stmd/issues/126