Why do we need to make improvements?

In #37842, we were looking to perform a wide-reaching change, which we've decided not to move forward with.

We received some really valuable feedback from the community and I want to take this moment to show meaningful changes we're making on the back of this.

This is based on my personal experience maintaining some other (smaller than Renovate, but still somewhat big) Open Source projects, as well as my time at Elastic, where I made some similar wide-reaching changes (sometimes with unexpected impact!), and learned some great ways to collaborate with a globally distributed, asynchronous organisation, similar to our community.

These communication changes largely focus on the Mend-hosted apps, but this will also impact how changes in Mend Renovate CLI (the Open Source project) may be communicated.

Changes we're making

Improved visibility for announcements

When making a change like this, we'll try and make it more visible to Renovate users.

There are 3 key ways we will look to share announcements:

As a GitHub Discussion

As a starting point, we now have a new Discussion category, "Maintainer Announcements", which will be used for - you guessed it - specific announcements from the Renovate maintainers.

This category has a corresponding Atom/RSS feed to follow in your feed reader of choice, if that helps avoid periodically re-checking

Modifying Pull Request headers

Where appropriate, we'll use the prHeader configuration to tweak the PRs generated by the Mend Renovate Cloud infrastructure to provide a link through to an announcement for information, as we did with #37842:

We'll also make sure to use a more visual indicator, such as the "important" blockquote announcement (via), as with ☝️

Social Media

We'll post a link to the announcement on our social media accounts:

• @renovatebot on X (Twitter)
  • (related: help us recover our account! Help us recover our X/Twitter account #38311)
• @renovatebot.com on Bluesky
• (We are discussing creating a LinkedIn page too)

Other mediums

At this time, we’re not looking at adding on the requirement to email out to every user of Renovate to inform them of changes, given the scale of our userbase - but that may change depending on changes that we plan in the future.

Clarity on timelines

In #37842, we didn't have a clear timeline called out - partly as we were still working on defining that internally - which we appreciate can be frustrating as a user, unsure of when changes like this may happen.

Going forwards, we’ll make it clearer what the expected “end date” we’re targeting will be - or if there isn’t one, we’ll make that clear.

In a similar vein, we'll also clarify what the Time-To-Live (TTL) is for feedback.

From this, it’ll be clear to the community how much time they have to feed back to the project on thoughts about the proposed change, and a clear understanding of when it will then come into effect after that period has completed.

Keeping FAQs in the Discussion

We'll make sure that the initial comment of a Discussion announcing the change will have a “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)” style section, covering key questions asked of the community (or predicted by the maintainers) to help pre-empt questions.

Additionally, we’ll keep the initial comment updated with any other updates, such as changes to timelines, or changes to the decision, as well as clarifying i.e.:

Ensure Discussions are pinned

We'll make sure that an announcement will be pinned to the top of the GitHub Discussions page.

We already do this fairly well as a project, but wanted to clarify that this is the intent for changes like this.

Feedback

Any feedback? Please drop comments below!