Allow an exclude list for users often mentioned incorrectly.

[peterwilsoncc]

Problem

This comes out of the comment from the GitHub user paul who is frequently mentioned due to some incorrect meta data

Could you fix your bot that keeps mentioning me? I'm getting dozens of notifications a month from this project. https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pulls?q=sort%3Aupdated-desc+%22%40paul%22

WordPress/wordpress-develop#6465 (comment)

Feature Request

Add a configurable attribute to be added on either a repo or organisation wide option to block particular users from being mentioned by the bot.

It would be good if there could be a way of doing this so it applies to both trunk and backport branches of the various projects.

Workaround

We could add the user paul to the manual exclude list but having it configurable would be preferable.

Repository

https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop

[desrosj]

Hmm, it seems that this scenario was caused by paul bearne incorrectly being interpreted as paul, which seems like a bug.

I don't love the idea of having to maintain an exclude list. Users should only be pinged if their .org/GH accounts are not linked. Maybe instead there is a way that the bot would only ping unlinked accounts once in a while to avoid being pinged repeatedly?

[swissspidy]

Maybe a hardcoded exclude list just for paul while figuring out the bug that causes the mis-ping? Throttling pings seems like an overkill and would not address this bug either.

[peterwilsoncc]

The misidentification by the bot was caused by the commiter meta data not being a valid email address, paul bearne <paul>, maybe some simple validation would help to ensure the email address contains an @ and a . character. Anything else can be assumed to be a failure.