1325772 - Want 'soft block' instead of 'hard block' needinfo + reviews

Status: NEW

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Extensions, enhancement)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

I'm about to be away until January 3rd.

My only options to help set people's expectations are:

- change my username
- remove the ":" prefix from my username to make it harder to find me for reviews on BMO (doesn't really work given mozreview and bzexport's cache)
- block needinfo and/or reviews

The last one was, AIUI, meant to be a solution in case of review overload or absence. However, I find its use very annoying in practice (for myself as well as others):

1) it breaks publishing in mozreview entirely (you have to figure out how to edit the list of reviewers, remove the 'offending' one(s) and then publish - bug 1320976 to improve this on the commandline client)
2) it offers no "I'm OK with not getting a response until date X, just let me do it" option
3) it makes people resort to personal email or bug comments to get me to do stuff, which is strictly worse than it being in my queue when I get back
4) it's very confusing for new folks, who are told "use this thing to get me to review stuff", and they're now told "NOPE" and have no idea what to do instead.

A more user-friendly approach would be something akin to 'out of office' notifications that email has traditionally used (rather than directing all email to /dev/null with or without notification to the sender). I would like people requesting flags to be told "this user has said they're not available [until X], are you sure you want to ask them?" - bonus points for "alternative people to ask in this component are B or C". This is more human-readable and would avoid some of the annoying consequences above.


(This should probably live in another component, but I can't find one that's specific to the 'block needinfo' feature)