How to deal with all the PRs?

[mal-tee]

How should we tackle all the suggest-PRs? The pile is growing and growing...

Should we disable the suggest feature on website? Or only for new companies? Or is Benni's new tool the solution for all of our problems?

The status quo is obviously not sustainable.

[mal-tee]

If we want to keep suggests open we should reduce the noise. I have a few ideas:

Technical solutions

• Enforcing phone no formatting.
  - Often suggest PRs are noisy because the whitespace in the phone or fax field changed. We might be able to fix this by enforcing the formatting in our tests. This will introduce one nasty mass-format commit, but should reduce noise afterwards.
• Fixing dropped "false" records. This is a known bug in our form generator. This is kinda in-progress, since Benni is working on a replacement.
• Don't accept PRs that don't change anything.

Semi-technical solutions

• Triage-System
  • If we can not address all suggests anymore we should establish a priority system. This should be supported by a bot or frontend to automatically show the most important suggestions. A few ideas for criteria:
    • Update vs New Company
    • Category of the company, i.e. addresses and health might be more important than travel?
    • Quantity of changes to this company in the past/no. of total suggests
    • ...
• Nudge users to file PRs on GitHub instead of using suggest.
  • Maybe via a counter? If you've submitted > X suggest, we ask you to file PRs instead?
• Turn successfully processed "custom companies" into suggests.
• Since we've got the new my-requests page we could only accept suggestion for new companies if a user has successfully made a request to them?
  • This might raise the quality of sent suggestions, but could also increase the quantity...