I found the following lock bot in JupyterLab - perhaps of relevance to JupyterHub as well?
See our discussion on https://github.com/jupyterlab/team-compass/issues/6 about it.
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I remember for JupyterHub/Binder we have discussed this topic before. We should dig out that conversation and resume it if people’s thoughts have changed. I tried searching for “lockbot”, “issue lock bot” but couldn’t find it :-/ Maybe someone else has more luck with the GitHub search.
My opinion (unchanged from when ever we last discussed this) is that my biggest pain point is a low signal-to-noise when it comes to GitHub notifications. Many notifications are about something where I can’t do anything. Each one only takes a few seconds to look at but if lots of the notifications are “noise” it gets tedious.
The lockbot would increase the noise as it creates several posts before closing/locking an issue which aren’t actionable by humans and GitHub notifications/octobox doesn’t let me easily filter them out. I am not bothered by open issues that haven’t seen any recent activity. They slowly filter to the bottom and might or might not come back to life if someone picks them back up.
I use https://github.com/jupyterhub/binderhub/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc as the default view/sort order for issues and PRs. A lockbot would bump things to the top of this list, which IMHO should be reserved for the most important/active/relevant items. Not those we explicitly marked as “not important now”.
If there was a way for a bot to take action without generating a notification or touching the “last modified” date on an issue I’d be much more in favour.
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I do like the idea of a bot that posts on stale issues (if there was no response to the original post and 60-90 days after last activity) with a message about how to help the team get around to issues like this. nteract had a good message for this that gave people advice on what tasks they could help out with to help generate “free time” amongst others in the project which would increase the chances of someone getting around to this issue.
On the BinderHub repos we don’t really have a problem with people commenting on random/old issues/PRs. So to keep overall notification volume down I’d be Ok with instituting a policy of by hand/by bot closing&locking an issue if someone does this instead of doing it to all issues in a preventative fashion.
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You can set the lock bot up to not post a message, and then I think there won’t be any notifications. That’s how nteract has it set up, and I haven’t received any lock bot notifications from them.
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