Opt Out Specific Repos

[aaronpowell]

I have over 200 public repos on my GitHub, accumulated over the past decade. With the recent run I have 39 open PRs across my repos, many of which are against projects that are not active/not relevant/dead.

Some examples are a Win8 XAML project or a WinJS wrapper.

Could there be some intelligence added to the repo detection, that if there hasn't been a commit since a pre-determined point in time (maybe since before the CA team existed), the repo is ignored? I'd argue that if you haven't committed to a repo since the CA team was created, it's probably not impactful to our tracking.

[TheCodeTraveler]

To avoid the same number of pull requests next month, I recommend merging the Pull Requests opened this month.

I know it sucks, but it's insanely easier to merge its PRs than it would've been to manually parse each of your READMEs and add the WebTrends query by hand.

It was expected that this tool would find a lot of missing WebTrends queries during its first run and thus open a lot of PRs. After merging this month's PRs, you will receive substantially less PRs next month.

[aaronpowell]

I don't really feel like merging is a best outcome here though. The result of these PR's is that it's now surfacing up projects that are long past being relevant. If you look at my current repo list (from an in-private session) the top three projects are things that dead (having had no commits for between 2 and 9 years).

Now sure, I should archive old repos, but with over two hundred repos it's a lot of effort for minimal impact.

It also doesn't address the underlying cause, so the next person who joins the CA team may well find themselves in a similar situation. Or if we change how the tracking codes are done, then we're back to the same problem.

I see value in the tool, in much the same way I see value in DependBot. But like DependBot, there's a bunch of times that it provides me with PRs on projects that it's low-value to fix, resulting in noise that I'm disinterested in and diminishing the overall value.

[TheCodeTraveler]

I highly recommend that you merge the PRs to understand which GitHub repositories do have an impact with the developer community.

Without using WebTrends, you don't have insight into which of your GitHub repos are receiving engagement from the community. You'll likely be surprised that a few repos you think are "dead" are actually receiving engagement. But we can't know which repos are receiving the most engagement without leveraging WebTrends.

For me, I learned that a few repos I had assumed were "dead" weren't, and thus began to actively maintain those repositories again.

I get it - it requires some time to merge the PRs. I too have over 200 repos and this tool opened 50+ PRs for me. It took about 20 minutes to merge all 50+ Pull Requests.

[spboyer]

Related #15

[TheCodeTraveler]

I just realized I never answered your initial feature request, @aaronpowell!

I'm totally down for giving each Advocate the ability to surgically opt-out specific repos, instead of opting-out completely as is the functionality today.

I personally don't have the bandwidth today to work on this feature today, so I've added the 'help wanted' label to encourage anyone to take the lead.

[TheCodeTraveler]

Spec

Add website that allows each Azure Advocate to opt-out specific repos.

• Add page to Opt Out Website
  • Provide dropdown that includes every GitHub repo for the signed-in user
  • Allow each repo to be tagged as "opt out"
• Opt Out Database
  • Add Repository table
• GetGitHubReposFunction
  • Add logic to verify whether the repository retrieved from the GitHub API is (or is not) in the Repository table in the Opt Out Database