Should new issues include a take/untake reminder?

[Phoenix500526]

Context

Maka lets contributors self-assign an unclaimed issue by posting a comment whose entire body is take. Posting untake removes the assignment. These commands are documented in the contributing guides, but contributors may not see them when they open an issue.

PR #4127 proposes posting a short automated reminder on every newly opened issue.

Proposed behavior

When someone opens an issue, a workflow would add this comment:

Thanks for opening this issue.

Use one of these commands:

• take: Assign this issue to yourself.
• untake: Unassign yourself from this issue.

This would put the commands at the point where a contributor may need them. It would also add a notification and an automated comment to every new issue, including issues whose authors do not intend to work on them.

Questions

1. Is there still a discoverability gap even though take and untake are documented in the contributing guides?
2. Should every new issue receive this reminder?
3. If an automatic comment is too noisy, where should these commands be surfaced instead?

Implementation under review: #4127

Drafted with OpenAI Codex and reviewed by the contributor of record.

[Phoenix500526]

@Astro-Han

[Astro-Han]

Thanks for pulling this out of the PR — it's the right call to decide it here.

My own view is that I'd rather not add it, though this is a preference rather than a decision.

The cost falls on the wrong people. Most people opening an issue are reporting something, not looking to claim work. Every one of them would get a bot comment and a notification so that the smaller group who do want to claim something sees the commands. Across every new issue, that adds up to a lot of noise for a fairly small prompt.

And the discoverability gap looks smaller than it might seem. 97 of our 221 open issues have an assignee — people are finding take already. It's in the contributing guides, and for agent-assisted work, an agent that reads CONTRIBUTING.md will find it too. If someone reads neither, the commands probably aren't the main thing they're missing about working in a public repository.

If we want it more visible, a line in the issue template seems like the cheaper place: same moment, same audience, no notification and no comment on every issue.

That said, I'd rather keep this discussion open than close it. If it turns out several people tell us they didn't know the commands existed, that's real evidence and worth acting on — I just don't think we have it yet.

简体中文

感谢你把这件事从 PR 里单独拿出来——放在这里决定是对的。

我个人倾向不加，不过这只是我的看法，不是结论。

成本落在了错误的人身上。开 issue 的人大多是来报告问题的，并不打算认领工作。为了让其中较少的一部分人看到这些命令，所有人都会收到一条 bot 评论和一次通知。摊到每一个新 issue 上，为了一个相当小的提示，噪音累积得不少。

而且可发现性的缺口可能没有想象中大。我们 221 个 open issue 里有 97 个已经有 assignee——大家已经在用 take 了。它写在贡献指南里，而对 agent 辅助的工作来说，会读 CONTRIBUTING.md 的 agent 同样能找到。如果一个人两者都不读，那么这些命令大概不是他在公开仓库协作中最缺的东西。

如果我们希望它更显眼，issue 模板里加一行似乎是更便宜的位置：同样的时机、同样的受众，但没有通知，也不会给每个 issue 都留下一条评论。

话虽如此，我更希望这个 discussion 保持开放，而不是关掉。如果后续确实有几位小伙伴告诉我们他们不知道有这些命令，那就是真实的证据，值得据此行动——我只是觉得目前还没有。

(Drafted with AI assistance; I verified the assignee numbers against the live tracker myself.)

[Phoenix500526]

It makes sense. I'll close that PR.