Hi Devs, I'm writing in response to the unintentional recent tagging of all committers across the ASF on https://github.com/apache/apisix/pull/2158 This is the latest, but certainly not the first, such occurrence.
The best practice is to simply never tag any teams at all. This will avoid tagging the wrong team members. However, even tagging the right team members should never be necessary. Here is why: 1. Tagging forces an extra notification, when normally people only get notifications when they choose to. Tagging overrides the choices individuals have exercised when choosing to subscribe to repositories on GitHub. 2. Developers on the team will already see the notice, since activity on GitHub is already mailed to developer-controlled mailing lists. 3. Tagging the team won't even reach your intended target audience. It is not a requirement to be a member of the team on GitHub in order to be a developer. So, the team you are trying to mention, is only going to be a subset of the team you are actually trying to reach in the first place. It won't necessarily include all the committers, and certainly won't include non-committer contributors on the project. 4. You will never accidentally mention the wrong team, if you never attempt to mention any team. 5. Teams are used for internal organization of committers on the project who happen to also have GitHub accounts registered with Apache. They do not necessarily reflect any group that would be meaningful to communicate with, such as the full set of committers + contributors. So again, one should never "@mention" any teams... *ever*. It's a bad practice. (I would also argue that "@mention" for individuals should be used sparingly, as frequent usage can be sees as a form of online harassment; use your best judgment for those and ask yourself if you really need to do it to reach your target audience, before doing it.) Instead of tagging a team, simply post your comment without the tag, and the project developers will already be reached without any extra effort. If you don't get a response in a reasonable amount of time, the next best thing is to send an email to the project's developer mailing list "dev@[project].apache.org" to request their attention. Please share these best practices with others, if you find it valuable to do so. Thanks, Christopher
