Hi!
Let me first express the change we're seeking: when leaving a comment on a ticket, consider it your responsibility that the right person(s) will read it! If you don't @mention someone, you probably are failing this responsibility!
[Note that @mentioning works in both Redmine and GitLab, and this proposal is meant for both.]
So far we have been relying on one person subscribing to all Redmine changes and constantly following up on new comments and notifying the right people so they are not "lost into the void". This is not sustainable (and IIRC GitLab does not support subscribing to everything?) so we need to distribute this work.
To me it makes most sense to put this responsibility on the poster, at least among us regular-ish contributors that are expected to have read the contributor's docs -- new (or "drive-by") contributors cannot be expected to have done this, and will be dealt with differently, some how.
In practice this means you should do the following when leaving a comment:
1. Figure out who you want to read the comment! A good resource for this is:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/#mentors
If you have trouble finding who to @mention, please mention @anonym and I'll try to help!
2. Is this person already the assignee of the ticket you are posting to? If so they will be notified any way, so we don't necessarily have to spam them further by @mentioning them. But please err on the side of over-using @mentions rather than under-using them! :)
3. Otherwise, just add a @mention (or several, if you think several people could be interested in this comment) somewhere in your comment.
4. Post!
What are your thoughts on this? I know this proposal isn't 100% bullet proof, it's more of a necessary reaction to the fact that we won't have a person doing all this work for us any longer.
Personally I think there might be a few cases when the above rule doesn't apply, e.g. if you just want to add some piece of info to a ticket no one is working on, just to make sure it is available to whoever might work on it in the distant future. Not sure how to formalize a rule around this, but remember: "please err on the side of over-using @mentions rather than under-using them".
Related to all this, if you need a technical rubber-duck, try talking to me (e.g. by private email or pinging me on XMPP)! If I cannot outright help you directly, I most likely can find someone who is better suited to help.
Cheers!
