Request info bot with GitHub actions

[GeorgianaElena]

I have played with GitHub actions following this Twitter thread (thanks @choldgraf for pinging me), hoping to achieve what the request-info bot does.

I managed to transpose the bot's behavior into a workflow and you can play with it here.
I got carried away and forgot to check before if GitHub workflows are supported at an org level and found out that they are not 😕

So, unfortunately until behaviorbot/request-info#49 gets merged (and hopefully solves the issue) or workflows are supported organization-wide I don't think we can have a request info bot (as long as we don't copy and paste configs across the repos individually 🤯 )

[choldgraf]

hmmmm - I am a little bit worried that it seems the request-info bot is not really maintained (seems the last PR was merged 2 years ago). What do you think we should do here @GeorgianaElena ?

[GeorgianaElena]

I think we have three more options that could be worth exploring:

• Wait (for the PR or for GitHub workflows to accept being configured from a central location)
• Try to see if extending the request-info bot in each of the repos works (but this means that we still have to manually add a file to every repo)
• Add the welcome bot (@sgibson91 mentioned it here ✨) and apart from congratulating new contributors for their first issue/pr we could also post a sweet message about following the templates and code of conduct? (the welcome bot seems to be using a more up-to-date version of probot and I believe it will allow being configured from this central repo the same way we did with the support bot).

Not sure which option is best, but I believe it would be really nice to have the welcome bot in JH.

[choldgraf]

+1 to welcome bot 👍 maybe that's a good compromise, since the kind of person we'd probably request more info from is a new user

[sgibson91]

Here's the welcome bot in action on The Turing Way: the-turing-way/the-turing-way#1183 (comment)

The only downside to this I think was mentioned by @betatim. It will welcome them the first time on all repos. So we may have seasoned KubeSpawner contributors who wander over to z2jh and are welcomed as if they're new. Though it seems to be the path of least resistance so far.

[choldgraf]

As long as the message isn't too annoying, I think it could be OK :-)

[betatim]

My first reaction to the "more info please" bot was that it would fail a lot of the time.

Thinking about this a bit to figure out why that was my initial reaction:

• sometimes an empty message in a PR is ok (the title tells you that it is a typo fix). It would be nice to have a message but having a bot chime in would just create noise
• sometimes a "not empty" (by counting characters) message is still empty because it is the default template

So overall it feels like there would be too many cases where the bot is wrong or unhelpful.

What do you think of making a canned message that we share in the team and then use the neural network in our contributors to (tweak and) apply it?