Show that the project is way out of schedule

[Murazaki]

You could use some data to let Adopt A Project deal with abandoned projects (case : the coder didn't bother updating the file).

You can check :

• last update vs frequency of updates before,
• date of the last issue the dev corrected vs date of the last issue entered
• keywords in last issues and readme

This would help dig out unmaintained and abandoned projects.

You can also send mails to some developers through the bot to check if they are still planning to maintain or not.

[jonobacon]

I think it could be interesting to have the notion of a vitality score. Essentially this would be a small script that scans a codebase to determine activity.

A simple determination here could be looking at the commit history and applying a blunt metric. For example, no commits in the last 6 months would suggest not much is happening.

I think the notion of generating .adopt files would be great, but I also have a gut feeling that part of a successful handover to a new maintainer would be a point of contact helping to move things over. For example, if I have a project I am not maintaining anymore, I think it would be helpful to walk someone through it briefly.

Now, this obviously doesn't happen for abandoned projects, and we have a more complex challenge in figuring out whether a project is abandoned or not (there is another issue open to discuss this).