Reduce notifications from Greetings workflow

[purva-thakre]

The .github/workflows/greeting.yml workflow sends too many notifications for someone who is not a first-time contributor.

Option 1: Make changes to the workflow to work around actions/first-interaction@v1 as the issue related to notifications is known to the maintainers and has not yet been fixed. actions/first-interaction#15

Option 2: Use an alternative to actions/first-interaction@v1 from the Github Marketplace.

• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/cron-first-interaction
• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/welcome-new-users
• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/first-issue-greeter

Option 3: Remove the workflow and rely on one of the maintainers to comment with the message.

[purva-thakre]

I vote for Option 3 since we are not inundated with an extremely large number of new contributors.

[cosenal]

Are those Github notifications? Where do I see them?

[purva-thakre]

@cosenal Whenever I create an issue, I get these Github notifications. Each notification in the screenshot is due to adding a label, assigning it to myself, or when editing the issue description. There's no way to reduce these based on what I found.

https://github.com/unitaryfund/mitiq/actions/workflows/greeting.yml

Edit: You can see these when @Misty-W created the PT issue. If I had created the issue, I would have gotten all of these notifications. The Greetings workflow runs too often when we only want to run it for new commenters and/or contributors.

[purva-thakre]

The Do Nothing portion of the workflow does not work that well once it's clear that it's not a first issue or a first PR.

https://github.com/actions/first-interaction/blob/41ddf9c83167223a120a277ed96cc1ad9f56dc0b/src/main.ts#L33

You can see it in action at #2208 (comment) when a person is new to the repo.

[natestemen]

@purva-thakre I think this is something to do with your personal GitHub notifications. I have never received any of these notifications. I wasn't able to find anything on first glance that would apply here, but I didn't do a thorough search through the notifications documentation: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/managing-subscriptions-and-notifications-on-github/setting-up-notifications/configuring-notifications.

I would think you can to turn off these notifications given others are not receiving them (or set up a filter in your email).

[purva-thakre]

I think these notifications were related to the watch repo option. Not perfect but I managed to stop these by ignoring all the repo activity.

I'll have to play around with the custom filter. I had all the boxes checked before.