Help issue authors understand why their issue was closed using a bot #1778
Replies: 1 comment 2 replies
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I think introducing more labels and maintaining bots to do this creates more problems than it solves. Github has a saved reply feature that can be used for this if one does not want to type. My angle to solve this would be to:
PS: The proposed comment template looks great! I am fine if we are using that. |
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I did not know about saved replies. That's really nice! I think that works well for this. Do we want to put this comment template in contributing.md to have a sort of "standardised" canned reply that we use for triage? |
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Yes, we can give it as an example, but I would not "enforce" it. |
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We don't want to close issues without comment
In #1775, concerns were raised about the act of closing issues. It can be a bit harsh and dismissive to close issues without providing an explanation. People who are new to open source can get discouraged from contributing. Ideally we would leave a comment on every issue in order to help users understand why their issue was closed and what they can do if they still need help or still want a bug to be fixed.
Leaving comments takes time
However, sometimes it is necessary to be efficient in closing low quality issues or questions for the sake of keeping track of things on the project. And this takes a lot of time if maintainers have to author a tailored response to every low quality issue.
Even if a maintainer has some canned responses on hand, they still need to take the time to find it, copy paste it and make adjustments where necessary. This kind of triage work can be quite time consuming and discouraging.
The solution
But what if it was possible to leave a sincere and reassuring comment on every issue that we close? We could let a bot communicate our thoughts!
Say we have a bot that triggers when an issue is closed. It would comment a message that explains a bit why it is sometimes necessary to close issues without comment. Something like this:
Technical details
I think it's quite straightforward to implement this feature using leave a comment. We can trigger workflows on issues getting closed.
Ideally this bot would only be triggered when an issue is closed without a closing comment. It would be unnecessary for the bot to repeat some of the things that the maintainer already explained in their closing comment. I'm not sure how to achieve this in the github workflow, though.
I think it should be quite simple to use different comments based on the labels of the issue, so that for bug reports, the comment can specifically talk about things like providing a minimal reproduction of the issues, etc.
It would be possible to use specific labels to direct the bot towards more specific responses, as well, such as:
closed: low-quality(they should to recreate the issue with a better description, minimal reproduction, etc.)closed: q&a(they should ask in Q&A under discussions)closed: cannot-reproduce(cannot reproduce)closed: other-project(the issue belongs on some other project, e.g. nestJS or validator.js)closed: duplicate(duplicate of another issue)closed: obsolete(issue is obsolete because it has been fixed or no longer applies for some other reason)Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
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