Discussions: Operator Setup Checklist
May 3, 2026 · View on GitHub
Operator-facing setup guide for the GitHub Discussions experience on the statewave repository. This is a one-time setup followed by light recurring maintenance.
The community-facing guide is in discussions.md.
One-time setup
1. Enable Discussions
Settings → General → Features → tick Discussions.
GitHub will create a default set of categories. The next step is to align them with the recommended layout below.
2. Create / align categories
Settings → Discussions → Categories. The recommended layout:
| Category | Format | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Announcements | Announcement | Releases, roadmap milestones, licensing updates (maintainers only) |
| General | Open-ended | Open questions, broad conversation |
| Q&A | Question / Answer | Setup help, usage questions, troubleshooting, deployment help |
| Show and Tell | Open-ended | Agents, integrations, memory workflows, evals, benchmarks built with Statewave |
| Ideas & Feature Requests | Open-ended (or Poll for prioritization) | Product / SDK / API ideas, integrations, admin UI improvements |
| RFCs | Open-ended | Design proposals for memory model, API shape, import/export, integrations, storage backends, security, architecture |
| Integrations | Open-ended | LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents SDK, MCP, vector stores, Postgres/pgvector, LiteLLM, local models, deployment patterns |
| Roadmap | Open-ended | Prioritization input — what should ship next |
| Research | Open-ended | Long-term memory, temporal memory, agent state, retrieval, evals, memory quality, context engineering |
| Support | Question / Answer | Practical help. Note: redirect security reports to security@statewave.ai |
GitHub doesn't yet expose category creation via the public API, so create these manually in the UI.
The default categories that ship on enable typically include Announcements, General, Ideas, Polls, Q&A, Show and tell. Consider:
- Keep: Announcements, General, Q&A, Show and tell, Polls (Polls can be repurposed inside Roadmap / Ideas threads).
- Rename: Ideas → "Ideas & Feature Requests" (clearer intent).
- Add: RFCs, Integrations, Roadmap, Research, Support.
3. Pin the starter discussions
Draft posts ready to copy live in pinned-discussions/:
| File | Suggested category | Pin? |
|---|---|---|
| welcome.md | Announcements | ✅ pin |
| what-are-you-building.md | Show and Tell | ✅ pin |
| roadmap-priorities.md | Roadmap | ✅ pin |
| show-us-your-memory-problem.md | Research (or General) | ✅ pin |
| rfc-memory-import-export.md | RFCs | optional pin |
| rfc-agent-integrations.md | RFCs | optional pin |
Posting workflow:
- Open the file, copy the title and body.
- New discussion → pick the category → paste.
- After posting, pin from the discussion page (top-right menu).
- GitHub allows up to 4 pinned discussions at the repository level. Pick the 4 that best serve your current goals; rotate as priorities shift.
4. Link Discussions from the README
The core repo README should have a "Community" section pointing to:
- GitHub Discussions
- This community guide (discussions.md)
- Issues vs Discussions vs SECURITY guidance
This is in place after statewave/README.md is updated alongside this checklist.
5. (Optional) Add .github/DISCUSSION_TEMPLATE/ form templates
GitHub supports per-category form templates at .github/DISCUSSION_TEMPLATE/<slug>.yml, similar to issue forms. The markdown bodies in discussion-templates.md can be ported into YAML form templates if you want stricter structure. Treat this as an optional follow-up — the markdown templates are useful even without it.
Recurring maintenance
Light-touch monthly review keeps Discussions feeling alive without becoming a second job.
- Roadmap & RFC threads — read accumulated comments, post a synthesis update, mark resolved questions.
- Triage:
- Confirmed reproducible bugs → convert to an Issue (use GitHub's Convert to issue action) and link back.
- Wishlist items → leave in Ideas & Feature Requests, or convert if scoped enough.
- Off-topic / spam → moderate or delete.
- Stale threads — discussions with no activity for >90 days and no clear question can be closed with a short note inviting the original poster to reopen.
- Security check — scan for any vulnerability-shaped posts. If anything looks like a real vulnerability, lock the thread, delete the sensitive details, and email the poster to redirect them to security@statewave.ai.
Things to keep out of public Discussions
- Security vulnerabilities (route to SECURITY.md)
- Customer / account specifics that belong in private support
- Specific commercial terms, contract negotiations, pricing for a particular customer (route to licensing@statewave.ai)
- Legal advice — point to qualified counsel and the published LICENSING.md