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Bugzilla’s approach: in your “what error message?” comment, you also set the needsinfo?(reporter@example.com) flag (a single checkbox does it), and it can stay

Bugzilla’s approach: in your “what error message?” comment, you also set the needsinfo?(reporter@example.com) flag (a single checkbox does it), and it can stay in that state indefinitely. This is then readily searchable, so that when you get round to doing another batch of manual triage you can quickly close it as incomplete, or try to follow it up, or whatever you like. This also highlights another crucial difference in Bugzilla: it keeps track of not just open/closed state, but also the reason: fixed, can’t reproduce, won’t fix, incomplete… whereas stale bots are a single awful blunt instrument that seem like they might help with closing incomplete bug reports, but in practice they do much more closing of real stuff, annoying of reporters, shoving of stuff under the carpet, &c. What the stale bots lack is nuance, because GitHub Issues is too generic to support a good triage bot that isn’t deeply specialised to a project. And even if you have a decent triage bot, there is no substitute for manual triage. It doesn’t need to take very long.

emersion 5y ago
This kind of workflow can be achieved with GitHub or GitLab issues by using labels. For instance, I often add a waiting-on-reporter label when asking for more info.
- techdragon 5y ago
  You could even have a friendly bot nag the user a few times over several months for the extra info, perhaps eventually closing it after a year.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    A conditional stale bot based on this tag being applied would be ideal IMO
scottlamb 5y ago
> Bugzilla’s approach: in your “what error message?” comment, you also set the needsinfo?(reporter@example.com) flag (a single checkbox does it), and it can stay in that state indefinitely. In my experience, in many projects the issue does stay in that state indefinitely, even after the reporter provides the info. The reporter doesn't have permissions to remove the label; the people who do have the permissions miss the notification and never do the manual triage you mention. They might as well just close anything that doesn't have enough information or (depending on your perspective) that they don't understand/care to understand. (For example: I filed an issue a couple months ago in which I explained the problem I was having, pointed out it contradicted the documentation, then proposed a solution. Then I opened a PR with the solution and explained it within the documentation and the commit message. Then I got asked a question in a PR comment that was answered in all three of those other places. I replied (explaining it in a fourth place), but the PR still has the "needs-reporter-feedback ?" label and isn't going anywhere.) Maybe the most useful thing a bot could do is remove this label after the next comment... or maybe it's just hopeless if a project doesn't care enough about their issues.

emersion 5y ago

This kind of workflow can be achieved with GitHub or GitLab issues by using labels. For instance, I often add a waiting-on-reporter label when asking for more info.

techdragon 5y ago
You could even have a friendly bot nag the user a few times over several months for the extra info, perhaps eventually closing it after a year.
- sodality2 5y ago
  A conditional stale bot based on this tag being applied would be ideal IMO

scottlamb 5y ago

> Bugzilla’s approach: in your “what error message?” comment, you also set the needsinfo?(reporter@example.com) flag (a single checkbox does it), and it can stay in that state indefinitely. In my experience, in many projects the issue does stay in that state indefinitely, even after the reporter provides the info. The reporter doesn't have permissions to remove the label; the people who do have the permissions miss the notification and never do the manual triage you mention. They might as well just close anything that doesn't have enough information or (depending on your perspective) that they don't understand/care to understand. (For example: I filed an issue a couple months ago in which I explained the problem I was having, pointed out it contradicted the documentation, then proposed a solution. Then I opened a PR with the solution and explained it within the documentation and the commit message. Then I got asked a question in a PR comment that was answered in all three of those other places. I replied (explaining it in a fourth place), but the PR still has the "needs-reporter-feedback ?" label and isn't going anywhere.) Maybe the most useful thing a bot could do is remove this label after the next comment... or maybe it's just hopeless if a project doesn't care enough about their issues.