Mention only users who are part of a team

[codewithtyler]

Hi, I'd like to bring this project up in one of our next project meetings. However, one of the concerns I know we'll have is the fact that we get PRs from the community and the reviewer is usually a Subject Matter Export in that field. Our GitHub organization is made up of two teams, the organization owners and organization contributors. The Contributors team is basically a group of PR reviewers. Once a person gets several PRs approved they are added to the contributors group and become one of the potential reviewers.

Is it possible to have the mention-bot pull the names from this team rather than just from anyone who touched the file? I just want to contact people on this team who have touched the file in the past.

[vjeux]

This should be pretty easy to hack into the existing code if you are so inclined.

However, I would warn against doing that. This is going to spam the hell out of all the people in that contributor list as they are going to be automatically subscribed to the thread. I would suggest you to try it as is and if it doesn't work, then modify the script to do it.

[aspiers]

I'm not sure I understand correctly, but it seems to me that the title of this issue doesn't match the description. The title contains the word "only", which suggests that this issue is about avoiding mentioning users outside the repository's organization, however that feature is already implemented and configurable via the requiredOrgs configuration parameter.

However the question "Is it possible to have the mention-bot pull the names from this team rather than just from anyone who touched the file?" sounds like it's not about avoiding mentioning users outside the organization, but instead about ensuring that all users within a team are mentioned. For example, if user A is in the team but was not included via alwaysNotifyForPaths or fallbackNotifyForPaths or findPotentialReviewers, it sounds like you still want user A to be mentioned anyway - is that right?

[waldyrious]

@aspiers I actually think both you and @vjeux may have misinterpreted what @RandomlyKnighted tried to say. The initial comment is a bit confusing indeed, but after reading it a few times what I understand is that he wants to restrict mentions to just members of the organization (either owners or contributors), since they have an explicit process to onboard frequent contributors from the community into the org. It seems that you guys think he wants to mention all users in the contributors team, but as I see it it's more about using that list as a filter to rule out code authors that aren't on that list. Essentially choosing the potential reviewers using the same method as presently, but picking from a curated pool of trusted reviewers rather than all github users.

I not really fond of that idea though, since I believe encouraging members of the community to become more involved (and eventually taking up more active roles in the project) is a good thing, and doing that as widely and automatically as possible ensures that human error, forgetfulness or mere availability lows (in the process of adding people to the manually curated contributors team) won't miss opportunities for contributions from people who would otherwise get prompted to get involved.

Automated processes like MentionBot can be the catalyst to keep projects alive and bustling as people naturally flow in and out of the maintainership role. (As a side-note, I think the Wikipedia community made a good choice in this regard, by considering the administrator role a "barrier removal" more than a "role attribution", since the latter view often leads to calls for more stringent criteria, periodic reconfirmation votes, activity minimums to retain the admin tools, etc.)

If this is ever implemented, I'd strongly suggest it to be an opt-in feature (i.e. off by default).

[vjeux]

@waldyrious thanks for the comment, now I understand it better :)

[waldyrious]

happy to help, and sorry for the long comment (I didn't realize how long it was at the time 😅)

[aspiers]

@waldyrious You're probably right, but this would still confirm my assertion that the PR title is completely at odds with the intent of the PR. If the intent is as you describe, then the title should be something like "Mention only users who are part of a team", because a GitHub team would be the most natural way to define the list of users which @RandomlyKnighted refers to as "contributors". However it would be nice if @RandomlyKnighted could clarify here :-)

[waldyrious]

Yeah, the opening comment is definitely a little unclear :)

[codewithtyler]

I've updated the title and my original post. Hopefully it's a little clearer now.

[aspiers]

Thanks, yes much better!