Perhaps also needs a message to show/send to the mentor when his status changes.

@KStoller-WMF if you'd like to schedule this work for Growth-Team (Sprint 0 (Growth Team)), please do so!

This was discussed during the 2022-10-26 mentorship prioritization meeting. Considering that T321502 makes it possible to do this via a bot/admin action, it was decided to not prioritize this for now.

In T321509#8347302, @Urbanecm_WMF wrote:

This was discussed during the 2022-10-26 mentorship prioritization meeting. Considering that T321502 makes it possible to do this via a bot/admin action, it was decided to not prioritize this for now.

It's worth remembering that not all wikis have bots, and not all wikis have bots with admin rights. Let's say in the Russian Wikipedia now I have to look for a bot with admin rights. We have a rather complicated scheme for issuing such rights.

Thanks for the feedback, @Iniquity. From my perspective: I like the idea of supporting this functionality, unfortunately after discussion it sounded like it would actually be a complex task to complete. And since Russian Wikipedia has a bot solution for now, we figured we would wait to see if other wikis are asking for similar functionality before prioritizing. In other words, we aren't prioritizing this immediately, but we are open to prioritizing it eventually.

Thanks, as always, for bringing good ideas and feedback to the Growth team!

In T321509#8347529, @KStoller-WMF wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, @Iniquity. From my perspective: I like the idea of supporting this functionality, unfortunately after discussion it sounded like it would actually be a complex task to complete. And since Russian Wikipedia has a bot solution for now, we figured we would wait to see if other wikis are asking for similar functionality before prioritizing. In other words, we aren't prioritizing this immediately, but we are open to prioritizing it eventually.

Yes, I agree with you, this is not a super critical thing, but it would be cool if it was implemented, even if other communities do not ask for it.

Thanks, as always, for bringing good ideas and feedback to the Growth team!

Thanks, as always, for the implementation :) Without you, there would be no ideas.

German mentor here, supporting this proposal (after aligning with my fellow mentors here). And if it's too complex to solve in one step, we'd suggest to start with the following first changes:

1. Add a wiki-specific configuration option to define the "allowed inactivity period" before a mentor is regarded as absent. (In ruwiki it's 30 days. In dewiki we agreed on 14 days.)
2. Replace the date in the "Last edit" column in Special:ManageMentors with a simple status (active / inactive) based on the last edit date and the configured period, which would not only make it easier to spot and manually flag inactive mentors as absent, but also address the privacy concerns raised in T321429#8348671 before.
3. Add a column in Special:ManageMentors indicating wether this mentor is currently flagged as absent or not.

With these changes, it would be much easier to manually track the activity and absence status of our mentors until the automated process is implemented.

Thanks for chiming in and offering ideas, @Tkarcher. I agree that if we implement this, we should let each wiki configure the "allowed inactivity period" before a mentor is regarded as absent.

Looks like English Wikipedia would also benefit from this too.

Korean Wikipedia discussed options to remove mentors from the list as well, and they'd like to enforce them. I told them to use a bot if possible, but having a more robust option would be very nice.

Another example showing the need to work on this task: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Growth/FAQ#Third-party_pausing_in_mentorship?

I checked on communities that set some rules, or planned to set them, regarding removing away mentors.

• Korean Wikipedia:
  • Users who have not contributed at least 20 general namespace contributions and 10 discussion namespace contributions within the last 3 months will be deleted from the list.
• Russian Wikipedia
  • Removing after 30 days of inactivity
• German Wikipedia
  • Removing after 14 days of activity

Based on those rules, what do you recommend for defaults? I was thinking something like:

After 7* days on inactivity, mentor is set to Away.
After 20* days of inactivity, mentor is is Removed from mentorship.

*Metric can be adjusted by admins via Community Configuration.

In T321509#9193761, @KStoller-WMF wrote:

Based on those rules, what do you recommend for defaults? I was thinking something like:

After 7* days on inactivity, mentor is set to Away.
After 20* days of inactivity, mentor is is Removed from mentorship.

*Metric can be adjusted by admins via Community Configuration.

I think it is a good first base.
We have to allow communities to disable the feature somehow so that it won't conflict with a community bot curating the list of mentors. The simplest option is to set the two variables we offer to 100.

@Trizek-WMF I actually thought the feature would be an opt-in one
(communities would have to intentionally enable it) rather than an opt-out
one. Do you have a preference on this?

In T321509#9237482, @Urbanecm_WMF wrote:

@Trizek-WMF I actually thought the feature would be an opt-in one
(communities would have to intentionally enable it) rather than an opt-out
one. Do you have a preference on this?

That was my assumption as well, that we would basically have three configuration variables:

1. enable/disable
2. set to Away after x period of time
3. remove from Mentorship after y period of time

And then we could roll this out to all wikis as disabled and let communities decide if they want to enabled it.

But I'm open to whatever @Trizek-WMF and Ambassadors think is best. I'll ask Growth Ambassadors about this in our meeting today.

Oh, yes, opt-in makes much more sense!

I've attempted to update acceptance criteria to capture what was discussed with Ambassadors today.