The result of minimizing a comment behaves differently via GraphQL & GitHub UI button

[plainheart]

Hi, I'm using the GraphQL minimizeComment mutation to hide the outdated or resolved comments. But it seems the GraphQL mutation doesn't behave the same as the GitHub UI button. See the pictures below,

GraphQL	UI button

This is the request content and parameter

mutation minimizeComment($id: ID!, $classifier: ReportedContentClassifiers!) {
    minimizeComment(input: { subjectId: $id, classifier: $classifier }) {
        clientMutationId
        minimizedComment {
            isMinimized
            minimizedReason
            viewerCanMinimize
        }
    }
}

The parameters are,

{
  "id": comment.node_id,
  "classifier": 'OUTDATED'
}

This is the response from GraphQL. It indicated that the comment was minimized with the expected reason. But the GitHub UI only shows the information like This comment has been minimized., with no specific reason.

{
  "minimizeComment": {
    "clientMutationId": null,
    "minimizedComment": {
      "isMinimized": true,
      "minimizedReason": "outdated",
      "viewerCanMinimize": true
    }
  }
} 

Is this different behavior by design?

[plainheart]

Hi, can someone help look into this issue? Thanks!

[willfish]

If you fetch these comments via the graphql query api you can see that the enum is setting the wrong value:

[
  {
    "id": "<redacted>",
    "body": "**Terraform plan output for development:**\n```\n\nNo changes. Your infrastructure matches the configuration.\n\nTerraform has compared your real infrastructure against your configuration\nand found no differences, so no changes are needed.",
    "isMinimized": true,
    "minimizedReason": "outdated"
  },
  {
    "id": "<redacted>",
    "body": "Testing with a comment",
    "isMinimized": true,
    "minimizedReason": "OUTDATED"
  }
]

[willfish]

The last comment, here is OUTDATED, I suspect we're seeing a fallback when they read the value out of the database

[SleipRecx]

I'm also experiencing this behaviour, someone looking into this?

[joshdk]

I ran into this behavior today, which is certainly a bug in the minimizeComment GraphQL API.

The comment that @willfish left was very insightful in understanding what is going on. It appears that the classifier enum is being lowercased internally after GitHub processes the API request. This now-invalid enum value results in the fallback "This comment has been minimized" message being displayed instead of the specific reason.

I was able to repro and verify this behavior using some Go code, but nowhere is it more obvious then using the GraphQL Explorer itself:

As an additional debugging point, the github.com web UI uses a completely separate (and inaccessible/undocumented) API to minimize comments (which correctly preserves the uppercase classifier), so this isn't a simple issue of e.g. incorrect GraphQL query inputs...

---

It would be very nice to have this bug fixed, as is is currently not possible to programmatically minimize comments for specific reasons.

Thank you!

[kylemclaren]

Recently ran into this and can confirm that the issue is exactly as @joshdk described. Would be nice if someone from GH could take a look :)

[josephwynn-sc]

Can confirm, if I try to use the lowercase minimizedReason the API returns Expected "outdated" to be one of: SPAM, ABUSE, OFF_TOPIC, OUTDATED, DUPLICATE, RESOLVED. However these uppercase reasons seem to be ignored by the UI.