Thanks for the details. Auto-closing more or less aggressively is a more complex tradeoff, and doesn’t need to make the same decisions as the process here. Though it’s closely related, it’ll be easier if I just avoid talking about closing and auto-closing.
If we’re seeing some unreviewed tickets in random sampling that don’t look worthwhile, then there may be an easy opportunity to present a richer set of tickets to volunteers, by filtering some out with minimal case-by-case judgement. When I looked at a small sample of tickets, I saw some where the “what’s the value?” field is empty or vague (and it’s not obvious from the rest of the ticket) - it’s not uncommon. Based on that, the chances are this sort of filter would make a difference, and that’s good particularly when there are lots of tickets and limited capacity. That’s why I’m suggesting it as a next iteration here.
It is, but clearing invalid issues requires the experience to assess them, so I wouldn’t expect most users to make the decision for most tickets. So without a more basic filter we’d either end up with volunteers doing irrelevant work, or lots of requests to experienced contributors to review whether tickets are valid. I think we could do without either.
We’ve already hit an edge case, where a ticket with really unclear value (not the ticket’s fault - the RFP itself is vague on why it’s valuable) was successfully picked up for someone’s first contribution, and that’s something we don’t want to get in the way of. I don’t think it makes a good argument for not filtering, though, not with the volume we have. There’s already a “good first issue” label that’s not widely used atm (4 open issues) and maybe could be, though I’m not sure how we could make that happen.