Changing project tags would have been a much better idea, and how every other backlog-focused team deals with similar situations. Even triaging as Lowest would have been better. Closing as Declined says that the task can't be completed by anyone, at any time. The choice to (improperly) decline a bunch of valid tasks is one thing, but doing it as a silent batch edit is another thing entirely. As I mentioned in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wcpss4hjs4552ak6, using a silent edit to make controversial actions has the appearance of an evasion of scrutiny. Even if the decision to use a silent batch edit was made in good faith (and I have no reason to think it wasn't), it still meant that the action was not properly communicated to those involved and is difficult for others to review. The only place the action was logged was on the tasks themselves, where it would only be seen by someone who happened to come across it. This goes against the idea that actions and decisions should be public and open for review if at all possible found both in Phabricator etiquette and the Wikimedia movement more generally. Silent batch edits are an extremely powerful tool, which is why only a few people have the ability to mark a batch edit as silent. However, the use of this ability does not appear to be routinely logged publicly, in Phabricator or externally <https://sal.toolforge.org/__all__?p=0&q=%22make-silent%22&d=>, which is unusual when compared to similar actions elsewhere. There is also no written documentation about when batch edits can be made silent, which sets up the potential for differing expectations like this. ACN On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:07 PM Bartosz Dziewoński &lt;matma.rex(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > > For tasks where you do not have the capacity to work on them, but which > are not declined, can you instead re-open them and only remove the > Readers-Web-Backlog project? > > > -- > Bartosz Dziewoński > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/