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by bfdm 814 days ago
While it might tickle metrics the right way, frustrating a user into giving up because your bot was not satisfied is not solving their problem.
3 comments

I was thinking in the context of an open source project, where the users are hopefully converting to productive community members. If it is, like, a job, with a customer service relationship, where they are paying to be able to just throw problems at you and you have to deal with fixing them, I’m sure this wouldn’t fly, so I agree there. (I think my brain short-circuited to open source because it is on GitHub, haha, but of course there’s no reason this couldn’t be used in a proprietary setting).

I’m not sure how it would work out in the case of a free, community driven project, though. The goal isn’t to serve users, it is to convert users into helpful community members. If the bot converts people who wouldn’t otherwise be converted, it seems like a win. If it chases away users who could have been converted with human intervention, that’s a lose. But the human community members can always jump into the thread as well… if the bot is filtering out lots of people and nobody from the community is intervening, I guess that tells us something about the priorities of the community, haha.

I think that depends on the exact KPI.
KPI stands for key performance indicator. It is a tool to grade people or teams by applying numbers to their work.

The only relationship you can have between these is that a ticket with a "resolved" status can be used as a KPI, but you're trying to invert the relationship here, which doesn't work. After all, it's an indicator and not a causal relationship

"ratio of open/total issues" can definitely be gamed by autoclosing anything that isn't an easy fix.

"average time to resolution" is also susceptible.

Both of these are pretty common all over the place, including OSS e.g. https://isitmaintained.com/#metrics

I suspect this sort of thing is one of the major motivations for the (as a user/reporter) infuriating rise in automated "this bug hasn't been touched in NN days, autoclosing for staleness" bots on various issue trackers.

This whole “worrying about KPI’s for my free, open source, community project” thing seems weird to me. (Not to say I don’t believe you, but I don’t understand why people want to inject this annoying mini-game into their hobby).

I’m not sure what to think about the auto-close bots. Which do you think would be more annoying as the person who made the report: having a report that just sits there forever and you just have to hope somebody decided to pick it up, or having the issue auto-closed? (I’m truly and honestly not sure). At least in the case of the former you have a clear marker for when you should try again. But getting rejected by a bot can definitely be annoying.

Oh, so you've experienced those "stale" bots on GitHub. Good times.