Prohibit endorsements; add staff-only warning for Needs: Staff / Internal - #8
Prohibit endorsements; add staff-only warning for Needs: Staff / Internal#8mekarpeles wants to merge 4 commits into
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Pull request overview
Updates Pam’s bot instruction docs to improve the tone and clarity of automated first-touch comments, especially given they post under a staff account.
Changes:
- Add a “Persona” section and explicit “no endorsements / no value judgments” rules for PR pre-review comments.
- Add an explicit warning block to issue refinement comments when an issue is staff-only.
Reviewed changes
Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
scripts/gh_scripts/PR_PREREVIEW_README.md |
Defines a stricter neutral “persona” and prohibits endorsements/value judgments in PR bot comments. |
scripts/gh_scripts/ISSUE_REFINEMENT_README.md |
Adds a staff-only warning block intended to appear early in issue refinement comments for staff-only issues. |
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| **If the issue has `Needs: Staff / Internal` label**, insert this block immediately after the thank you line (before any contributor-facing status): | ||
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| ```markdown | ||
| > [!WARNING] | ||
| > This issue requires access to internal infrastructure, production systems, or institutional knowledge unavailable to community contributors. It can only be resolved by a maintainer or staff member. |
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The new warning trigger references Needs: Staff / Internal, but the rest of this README (and other docs in this repo) consistently use Needs: Staff / Admin. As written, the instruction is internally inconsistent and could cause the workflow/agent to check for a label name that doesn’t exist in practice. Please either change this to Needs: Staff / Admin (to match existing label conventions) or update the label rules/checklists/docs everywhere to the new label name.
Two fixes to issue/PR bot comment quality:
1. No endorsements or value judgments in PR comments (
PR_PREREVIEW_README.md)Adds a Persona section and explicit comment rules prohibiting the bot from asserting that an approach is "right", "clean", "correct", or "good". Triggered by a real violation on internetarchive/openlibrary#12339 where the bot wrote "is exactly the right approach" — a technical opinion posted as
@mekarpelesthat he hadn't actually given.2. Staff-only warning block for
Needs: Staff / Internalissues (ISSUE_REFINEMENT_README.md)When an issue carries
Needs: Staff / Internal, inserts a[!WARNING]block after the thank-you line making it immediately clear the issue can only be resolved by a maintainer — before the contributor-facing blockers checklist.