Better auto-closing issues in PR template

[Michael21107]

Code of Conduct

• I have read and agree to the GitHub Docs project's Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

N/A

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

N/A

Additional information

The PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md is currently set up so that the issue linked, that the PR is supposed to close, is under ''Closes:''. This makes it, so the issue, although linked, isn't automatically assigned as one that is closed upon merging the PR. I think it would be nice to make it ''natural'', to link such an issue somewhere where it is auto-assigned as a ''closing'' one.

Example of a PR, that didn't trigger the closes automation of a linked issue upon merging.

[nguyenalex836]

@Michael21107 Good to hear from you again! 💛 Thank you so much for opening this issue. Just to make sure I'm following you, I'll do a quick recap:

1. When Add a section for the Important alert type to the style guide #35875 merged, the corresponding issue (the ''important'' alert isn't documented #35860) didn't close as the Closes keyword and the issue itself were on two separate lines, as noted by here!

Was written like this:

Closes:
https://github.com/github/docs/issues/35860

instead of like this:

Closes: https://github.com/github/docs/issues/35860

2. Given your comment:

I think it would be nice to make it ''natural'', to link such an issue somewhere where it is auto-assigned as a ''closing'' one.

what would you think of modifying line 7 of the PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md to read something like this? 🤔

Closes: [Be sure to link the issue on this line!]

This would hopefully prevent folks from accidentally linking their corresponding issue on a different line, and keep the Closes automation intact ✨ Eager to hear your thoughts!

[Michael21107]

I think that's good. I'd also remove the empty line between the comment and the ''closes'' line as that is IMO encouraging people to use the empty line, and not continue right after Closes:.

[nguyenalex836]

Awesome! Let me loop in one of our technical writers @subatoi to get his thoughts on the potential changes to the PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md 💛

[subatoi]

👋 Hi, thanks for the ping.

I think all that sounds fine—I would recommend using a placeholder that follows our guidelines for placeholder format and which is enclosed in backticks to ensure it's parsed as we'd like:

Closes: <YOUR ISSUE>

Happy to open this up.

[Haywhy28]

https://github.com/github/docs/issues/35979``

[nguyenalex836]

Thank you for the guidance @subatoi! ✨

@Michael21107 Would you be willing to open up a PR for this? 💛

[Michael21107]

@Michael21107 Would you be willing to open up a PR for this? 💛

On it.

@subatoi Could the text say #<issue number>?

[subatoi]

In hindsight my guidance was a little out of date: here's our formalised placeholder guidance https://docs.github.com/en/contributing/style-guide-and-content-model/style-guide#placeholders

So to answer your question, I would say yes, but with a small further tweak (uppercase/kebab-case, but no </> characters)

Closes ISSUE-NUMBER

[nguyenalex836]

@Michael21107 Howdy! An internal PR on which you were added as a co-committer will be merged shortly 💛

We decided to opt for using ISSUE_NUMBER (with an underscore) as the placeholder, as one of our engineers pointed out this enables selecting the entire placeholder when double clicking ✨

Thank you again for helping us improve this template! 🙇