New Twitter Bot Automatically Tweets Links to Trac Tickets Tagged as Good-First-Bugs

In 2014, WordPress Trac received a facelift and one of the improvements was the “good-first-bug” tag. The goal of good-first-bug tickets is to get newcomers familiar with WordPress code, processes, and contributing patches.

If you’d like to be notified of new tickets created on trac tagged good-first-bug on Twitter, check out the @GoodFirstBugs account created by Ryan Welcher. In three days since its creation, the account has accumulated nearly 100 followers.

I wrote a bot to tweet #goodfirstbugs for #WordPress core. Follow @GoodFirstBugs for great ways to start contributing!

— Ryan Welcher | See you at #WCEU in Basel (@ryanwelcher) April 7, 2017

The bot uses predetermined phrases to describe tickets. However, the phrases don’t do much to explain what the ticket is about. For example, the ticket linked in the Tweet below has nothing to do with the Capital P Dangit filter. I’d like to see the first few words of the ticket’s title be used instead.

Capital P Dangit! https://t.co/KgoJiiN72C #GoodFirstBug

— GoodFirstBugs (@GoodFirstBugs) April 9, 2017

Many of the tickets linked have the has-patch keyword assigned as well. This means that a contributor has already submitted a patch and it needs to be reviewed and or tested before it can be committed to core. Scott Buscemi suggests that the bot should ignore these tickets, an idea that Welcher may implement in future iterations.

As I’ve highlighted in the past, the tickets tagged good-first-bug help remove some of the fear and anxiety that comes with navigating Trac to contribute to WordPress. Using Twitter to publish links to these tickets will give them more exposure and may lead to quicker adoption from new contributors.