Automatically close stale "needs more info" issues after time period

[tofumatt]

A few members of the Gutenberg dev team were chatting about repository management and realised that it would be handy to automatically close stale "Needs more info" issues after a period of time with no activity passed. There are GitHub bots that do this kind of thing, so unless there's any objection we'll enable this automation in the following way sometime on/after Sept 14:

1. Issue is labelled "Needs more info"
2. Issue has no activity for two weeks
3. Issue is automatically closed

If, at any point, the issue has activity but the label remains: I'd think the counter is reset. (Go back to step 1)

If we remove the label: no automated issue cleanup.

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Of course, any user can re-open their own issue in the repo even after it's closed. The aim here is good issue management; an issue labelled "Needs more info" means it's not yet actionable to us. If said issue stays open with no feedback it just crowds the repo without being actionable. This will improve that, hopefully.

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@youknowriad pointed out that many of the current issues with that label may no longer require it or need some kind of tending to, so it'd be wise to enable this after they've all been looked at.

[chrisvanpatten]

Love it… this would be a great application of Stalebot but it needs the label whitelisting PR to land first: probot/stale#37

[danielbachhuber]

If I might make a suggestion on workflow:

1. Issue is labelled "Needs more info"
2. Issue has no activity for two weeks
3. Bot mentions there hasn't been activity in two weeks and asks whether the issue is still valid, etc.
4. Issue is automatically closed after an additional two weeks.

[tofumatt]

My main issue with a bot asking is that anytime (at least in the past few months) we label something "needs more info" we ask for more info ourselves so there is definitely an issue notification/update sent out to the original poster. A bot chiming in adds noise for anyone subscribed to the issue without a real update since the status "hey, this needs more info" was set.

Realistically the original poster will get notified when the issue closes and if they needed an extra push from a bot, hopefully that motivates them to re-open 😄

To be clear the bot should mention why the issue was closed and that the user can re-open if they do have the chance to provide more info. We should use super-friendly, encouraging language.

All that said if I'm in the minority on that point happy to use that workflow, I have an "archive" hotkey in Mail 😄

[chrisvanpatten]

I think the extra nudge is beneficial. I'm fairly sure GitHub doesn't notify users when labels are added or when an issue is closed, unless they're explicitly watching the repo (via).

EDIT: That is to say, if a user misses the first notification, simply closing and/or marking the issue with a stale tag won't trigger a second notification, which might remind someone to come back and check in.

[danielbachhuber]

To be clear the bot should mention why the issue was closed and that the user can re-open if they do have the chance to provide more info. We should use super-friendly, encouraging language.

I'd be fine with this.

However, I wonder what percentage of https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22%5BStatus%5D+Needs+More+Info%22 are genuine "waiting for more information from the reporter" vs. "the reporter has replied but the contributor hasn't been able to respond yet / has other priorities / etc." Not to call out Sheri, but #9460 and #9414 are both examples of the latter:

I don't think a bot closing these issues is an effective project management strategy. If these issues are 50% of [Status] Needs More Info, then a bot is only going to compound the underlying problem.

[danielbachhuber]

compound the underlying problem.

Where the underlying problem is that the current system isn't sufficient for effectively resolving these types of issues. The implicit social contract seems to be:

Any WordPress user can file a GitHub issue about some topic related to Gutenberg, and contributors using the Gutenberg issue tracker are responsible for seeing the issue through to its successful conclusion.

It seems like we might also want to focus the social contract a bit.

[tofumatt]

Ah, snap, you're right. I get close notifications because I watch the repo, my bad.

Okay, a nudge first makes sense, I'm cool with that.

Again: someone can always re-open if needed, so ultimately there's no race against the clock. Maybe 10 days after the label is applied they get a nudge, 10 days after it's closed. But closing issues we can't move forward with because we lack context is useful for triage, doing bug sprints, etc.

Thanks @danielbachhuber and @chrisvanpatten for your comments: super-helpful! ❤️

[tofumatt]

Hmmm, it looks like https://probot.github.io/apps/no-response/ exists for this but doesn't support our preferred use-case, which is a nudge first and then closing it.

I'm going to go through the existing issues and make sure there isn't anything in there that shouldn't be labelled as "Needs more info", but going forward the bot will remove the label when a contributor replies, and I think in the future we can be better about clearing the label if needed.

It should be noted that the issue can always be re-opened, and the aim of this label is to mark only issues we can't take action on as-is.

[tofumatt]

And to be clear: if the "no-nudge" approach this version of the bot uses is too aggressive, we'll disable it and try something that suits us better.

[chrisvanpatten]

I did take a small crack at getting probot/stale#37 rebased, but the app had diverged pretty far from the diffs and my JS-fu failed me. Someone w/ more JavaScript skills could probably do it fairly easily!

[tofumatt]

I don't think this one is worth pursuing, as evidenced by its age and neglect. I'm gonna close this, but feel free to re-open if you think it's worth it. 😄