The Traffic team is going through a process of re-organizing the chaos of our primary tag and workboard, which has over the years become unmanageable due to a large volume of open, stale tickets. As a part of this process, a large fraction of the existing Traffic tasks will be temporarily moved to this new Traffic-Icebox tag as a holding area. There is a task for this work at T289787 .

Please note that many moves to this tag will be based on bulk queries (e.g. "all open tasks not updated in X months"), and some others might be made through a very hasty manual triage. Regardless of the mechanism, moves of tasks from Traffic to Traffic-Icebox are not intended to be any reflection of any personal or team opinion on the validity or importance of a given task. Our goal is to reduce the main Traffic workboard to active, ongoing work and current incoming issues. After the initial bulk splits of many tasks to the icebox, we will be re-organizing the columns of the main workboard into a more Kanban-inspired workflow, and we will also be doing a one-by-one human triage process on all icebox tasks by the end of this month (Sep 2021). This one-by-one triage process will include:

• Reviewing for the need to move tasks back to the primary Traffic tag (caught up in bulk filters or hasty imprecise decisions)
• Categorizing the tasks into Icebox columns by their nature (new features/ideas vs issues, difficulty/complexity/scope, etc).
• Pinging stakeholders (author, assignee, and/or others) for updates or resolution (or, in some rarer cases, closing immediately when it seems clear this wouldn't be controversial or contended by stakeholders).
• Un-tagging (from both traffic team tags) for tasks which are being managed by other (sub-)teams on other boards, where Traffic doesn't have any significant stake or role in the task.

At the end of this first pass of triage, most of them are expected to remain open in the Icebox for some time. The Icebox is not intended to be a graveyard! Over the next couple of quarters, we'll look for new ways to organize some of the ideas and requests captured in many of these tickets (and in the future!), possibly outside of Phabricator. This may, for example, take the form of a public wiki space for discussing and vetting future ideas or difficult design issues, which can help with prioritizing and funneling them into the active, KR-driven workflow on the main Traffic workboard as they become viable, prioritized projects.

Please excuse our mess and be patient with us, at least this month, as we move through the early phases of this slightly disruptive process!