Jory RaphaelUntil recently, the Font Awesome GitHub repo had over 4,000 open issues. By my count … that’s a lot. When working well, an issue tracker helps maintainers keep an eye on bugs and troubles the community is having with their product. To put it bluntly, our issue tracker was NOT working well. Especially when you consider that almost 75% of the open issues were icon requests. And over 50% of those were brand requests. As they say in the business … that’s a whole lotta meatballs requests.
How did we get here?
Well, Font Awesome has been around for over a decade. And for a long time, it was in the hands of only one person — in charge of both bug fixes and icon creation. But as Font Awesome has grown, so has the complexity of our offering (for better or worse … but that’s a conversation for another time). And yet … icon creation has remained (mostly) in the hands of one to two people. Keeping up with requests has not only been hard for us (we have other responsibilities) but it’s been hard for the community to see what’s what and help shepherd along requests they deem valuable.
A side effect of the icon requests piling up is that we’ve been unable to see the forest for the trees. Important, show-stopping bug reports sat, undisturbed, between requests for a biceps icon and Zodiac symbols. (Not to worry, both are being worked on and will be in our next release.)
So, how are we addressing this?
Inspired by recent discussions with Cory LaViska and Zach Leatherman, we’ve made the decision to lean heavily into, ahem, discussions. Or, more aptly into GitHub Discussions. Moving forward, we’ll only be using our issue tracker to track actionable items and bug reports. Everything else? A Discussion. This keeps things cleanly organized by category, and allows us to focus on what’s most important, right now.
- Bug Report → Issue
- Actionable Piece of Work → Issue
- Ask a question → Discussion
- Ideas/suggestions → Discussion
- Waxing Philosophical → Discussion
And, perhaps most pertinent to this post:
In the short term, this means we have made the difficult decision to batch close our currently open icon request issues, and are asking folks to re-open them if the icons are still needed. This gives us a bit of a clean slate moving into 2026. (And just for peace of mind, we did record the most popular requests prior to making this change, and are actively working on a number of them.)
You can keep track of what’s popping the stack in terms of popularity and see what we’re working on next, by visiting the Icon Leaderboard.
