From 68e96bc73f0b19b0f0ccdbecb79fdd461a0b75eb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Greg Price Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 13:12:52 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] contributor docs: Clarify how to claim a mobile issue The existing text says to post a GitHub comment "saying that you'd like to work on" the issue. A lot of new contributors, understandably, take that literally -- they just say they'd like to work on the issue, with no further information. In particular they don't give any evidence that they've taken the steps we prescribe in the preceding section, of figuring out what code is involved and how they'll approach the problem before they claim it. When I reply asking for that information, very often they haven't done those steps... while sometimes they have, and just hadn't put together from context that that would be a good thing to communicate. So spell that out explicitly. Hopefully this will elicit smoother communication from the contributors who have done that work; and for those who haven't, hopefully it'll help redirect them to go back and do it. Also expand on the instruction not to spam. --- CONTRIBUTING.md | 10 ++++++++-- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index 05e330ab30..392a8f2d21 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -219,8 +219,14 @@ issue you're interested in. There is no bot for other Zulip repositories ([`zulip/zulip-flutter`](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-flutter/), etc.). If you are interested in claiming an issue in one of these repositories, simply -post a comment on the issue thread saying that you'd like to work on it. There -is no need to @-mention the issue creator in your comment. +post a comment on the issue thread saying that you've started work on the +issue and would like to claim it. In your comment, describe what part of the +code you're modifying and how you plan to approach the problem, based on +what you learned in steps 1–4 [above](#picking-an-issue-to-work-on). + +There is no need to @-mention the issue creator in your comment. There is +also no need to post the same information in multiple places, for example in +a chat thread in addition to the GitHub issue. Please follow the same guidelines as described above: find an issue labeled "help wanted", and only pick up one issue at a time to start with.