Sun Jan 29 23:17:11 2012, comment #2:
Hi Brandon -- thanks for jumping in with this.
I completely agree with 1) and 2), but (despite what I wrote originally :) why delete old postings, any more than there is to delete old bug reports? After all, it's not unlikely that the same need will recur after a volunteer leaves a project. As long as a posting is closed, it wouldn't be normally visible, so it seems harmless.
Also, I'm not sure about "forcing" people to change the text. For example, I have two jobs open for Texinfo that are just about to hit a one-year mark. They are still open, but there is nothing to change about the text. I guess I could do some meaningless tweak just to update the date, but if a maintainer chooses not to do that, I don't think it would be right to just arbitrarily close it.
In general, if a maintainer says a job is still open, I don't think it's our place to close it, regardless of whether the text is updated.
Thus, my proposal would be less hard-line:
- if a posting is open and >1 year old, contact maintainer.
- if maintainer says it's old, fine, we or they can close.
- if maintainer says it's still valid, fine, leave it open (and strongly recommend they update the text as needed).
- if maintainer does not reply, give them a while, try again (maybe from another email account, given the realities of spam filters) and say "we will close this soon if we don't hear from you", and so that in another week or two.
wdyt?
thanks again,
k
|
Sun Jan 29 11:31:56 2012, comment #1:
I agree that it should be cleaned up.
I've rethought it and changed my opinion compared to what I wrote to savannah-hackers-public. Here is how I think it could be handled:
1) Once a posting has been open for one year, contact the poster to confirm that the position is still open
2) If the position is still open, request that they update the post. If the position is closed, set the post status to "closed"
3) Once a post has been closed for one year, remove it
The initial clean-up should be handled a bit more leniently, though. For example, people would be requested to update posts between, say, one and three years old. After the requests go out and a reasonable amount of time passes to allow action by the posters, any closed or non-updated Help Wanted ad would be removed.
From the user's perspective, this would, first of all, keep the Help Wanted section fresh and cleaner for browsing. However, by keeping some closed positions around for a while, the user has an idea of other recently active projects that would still probably like some help. I think, though, that in any active project, a lot changes over the course of a year, so after a few years, a posting becomes essentially irrelevant without some sort of update from the project managers. That's why I would take a pretty hard-line view about removing old ones.
By the way, if it's possible with Savane, it might be nice to add a "Status" column to the Help Wanted listing page.
|
Sat Dec 13 00:40:23 2008, original submission:
[a user made this suggestion to me.]
looking at the developer jobs list (https://savannah.gnu.org/people/?category_id=1), there are jobs going back to 2001.
perhaps it would be useful to send a reminder to people whose jobs have gone N years without change, and ask them to update it -- a posting would seem more likely to actually find people if it is periodically updated. (Even if there are no actual changes to the job description, trivial changes could be made to bump the date.)
perhaps we should even go so far as to delete jobs that have gone, say, 2*N years without change. i'm even less sure about this, though.
maybe N = 2.
just an idea.
|