When sending "stale review" notifications, create separate threads on GitHub Discussions.

[seanlip]

Currently, all our "pending review" notifications go into a single thread on GitHub Discussions. This makes it hard to keep track of pending reviews, because we cannot easily mark a message as resolved or see which of them are still open, It is also a bit difficult for reviewers to find the latest thread that they are supposed to look at.

Instead, it would be nice if the stale review notifier did the following each time it ran:

• Delete all old threads in that GitHub Discussions category.
• Collect the list of contributors and the PRs assigned to them.
• For each person in that list, create a new thread in the "Notify Reviewers" category titled "Pending Reviews: @xxx", where @xxx is the name of the user.
• The top message in that thread should be the one that's currently sent -- but change the "It looks like..." sentence to "The following PRs are blocked on your review:"

This would have the following effects:

• https://github.com/oppia/oppia/discussions/categories/notify-reviewers would show a list of threads with pending PRs, one for each reviewer.
• We can turn that category into a Q&A one, and maintainers (or the corresponding reviewer) can resolve threads as they get addressed. This makes it easy to see which reviews are stalling and take action to address those.
• If reviewers are watching for their username, they'll only get emails that pertain to them.

[SD-13]

@seanlip I would like to work on this issue to check the feasibility of all the points you mentioned and work on them. Thanks!

[seanlip]

Thanks @SD-13, assigned you!

[SD-13]

Delete all old threads in that GitHub Discussions category

This makes it easy to see which reviews are stalling and take action to address those.

@seanlip If we delete all old threads (including "open" threads), how we are going to monitor stalling reviews?

[seanlip]

Deletion of all threads is only done just before we populate that category with new threads. This way, the category will only contain the latest stale review threads.

[SD-13]

Okay. Then we will be able to monitor stale reviews till new threads are created.

[SD-13]

This is working in my test repo with one issue, sometimes it is not deleting last few discussions and I am looking into that.
test repo: https://github.com/SD-13/test-pending-review-notifier
https://jam.dev/c/aa9f8633-7f49-4c74-8b08-402bf203fab3

[SD-13]

sometimes it is not deleting last few discussions

Can't reproduce the issue anymore https://jam.dev/c/c9a2c136-9b90-4a6e-bf47-bb6ee4accbef