I appreciate the thoughtful and specific feedback. We are working hard to make merge requests and issues intuitive and easy to work with. Many of your observations regarding merge requests are being worked on as part of this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33095
I'm really sorry that I cannot help by posting this on your issue tracker but I don't have the time right now to sift through all relevant issues on Gitlab to find out where to post and what already has been posted.
My biggest gripe is just that the issue elements (comments, actions, label changes, description edits) are looking too similar for a quick glance. The light-grey font on a white background makes it pretty hard. My suggestion would be to do it a bit like Gihub and to add a black border around stuff, take another background color for actions, and get rid of the grey font and replace it with black throughout.
We're working on lots of UX improvements. There's a navigation overhaul planned [1], you can also check out a list of all current UX issues with [2]. As always, community feedback is something we always welcome wholeheartedly [3]
[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794
[2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...
This comment reminded me to create issues for reducing clutter on the MR page [0], and expanding multiple resolved discussions [1]
On Github you can easily see what happens, comments are surrounded by a black border, the name of the comment author and the date are clearly visible and have a different background color from the comment text. Actions like closing and re-opening are distinctly different from comments and are color coded (green -> re-opened, red -> closed, purple -> merged). Emoticons are part of the comment box and don't visually drift into the next one.
Gitlab on the other hand separates comments by a thin (1px) light-grey line that is hardly visible on low contrast monitors like TN displays. Closing and re-opening is also displayed as a light-grey icon on a white background. The author's name has the same color as the comment text, with the date being, again, light-grey. Nothing keeps the contents of a comment together, it's all just text on a white background. The emoticons are just floating around the comments, with the same margin to the next comment as to the comment they are belonging to. So you have to know that emoticons are always below a comment.
Github's design is far, far superior to Gitlab's design because it allows skimming instead of concentrating on finding where each comment begins and ends.