Academy: Stale issue tracker

[degville]

It would be useful to keep track of assigned tasks, at least to see they are still being worked on. Maybe some sort of Stale Issue bot-type action to comment on issues and prompt people for a status update.

[userMaximilian]

It looks like the 'stale issue' action would be able to handle the basics quite well (i.e. prompting a prospective contributor with a comment and labelling the issue as stale/inactive after a set period of time has elapsed since the last update). It also looks quite easy to set up (although I haven't tested it) and there's quite a few configuration options too.

A few things that would need to be decided include:

• when should the prompt be sent (say three or four weeks after the last comment?)
• whether prompts should be sent for inactive open PRs, in addition to issues (this could be changed at a later date)
• whether issues assigned to the technical author team should be exempt from prompts
• what the prompt message should be

I would be happy to upload a draft action here, if that would be useful.

There are a few limitations with the 'stale issue' action, however. For example, I don't think it can unassign an issue from someone if they don't respond to the prompt in a set period of time. That said, it's probably easy enough to achieve this with a second GitHub action that works alongside the 'stale issue' action - I would be happy to look into this, unless anyone else is interested.

[userMaximilian]

Hello @degville - I just wanted to follow up quickly about the above, particularly as I didn't mention you in my comment, so I wasn't sure if you had seen it.