[tor-project] PSA: noisy GitLab bot on the loose

[Antoine Beaupré]

Hi everyone,

You might have noticed getting a little more email from GitLab than
usual this week. It's because I have deployed the fancy 🤖Triage Bot🤖
that was already in operation inside the "team" TPA project to all TPA
and web projects over the week.

This has first generated a flurry of email as the bot went through all
the stale issues we had lying around (and we had a lot!). It also was
pinging the author of the ticket instead of the assignee. That was
partly fixed: it doesn't explicitly ping anyone now, but still makes a
comment. A discussion is ongoing on how to improve that workflow here:

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/triage-ops/-/issues/11

More stale issues are bound to come up in the future: the trick here is
that, when you have an issue assigned to you and it's marked Next,
Doing, or Needs Information, you MUST update it once in a while, at
*least* once every other week.

Technically, the bot should be even more aggressive: the ~Doing label is
supposed to be "work done this week":

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-5-gitlab#triage

(On the other hand, the ~Next label is "work done this cycle, typically
a month", so it's a bit too aggressive on that.. I personnally do not
mind the reminder after two weeks, personnally, but I'm happy to tweak
this if people find that too noisy.)

I should probably have made a TPA-RFC for this since it seems to affect
more people than I expected, but for now this announcement will have to
do. Comments welcome in the above issue or please make a new issue in
the triage-ops repository if you have more concerns about the bot!

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/triage-ops/-/issues

Have a nice day and thanks for flying TPA. :)

-- 
Antoine Beaupré
torproject.org system administration
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