Changes to certain Event API and related features

[aspeckofdustin]

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Hi there, GitHub community!

I am the PM for the Sunset team at GitHub, which is primarily responsible for deprecating legacy architecture and finding ways of reducing resourcing-intensive aspects of our product. One change that we have made recently was to reduce the event data retention window for specific features (reference) so that we can reduce our database footprint by 2/3 and free up that capacity to increase our availability. The impact of this is to eliminate experiences where users have empty Feeds due to erroring out.

As a result of this, the dormancy window for user activity also reduces down to a 30-day interval. We know that there have been many requests for greater flexibility in the criteria of dormancy, but this was a necessary change for us to be able to support our system as we introduce more features that require greater event writes.

Where will you see this change?

This will impact the current Dormant users report feature, where users who are 31+ without activity would fall into the Dormant category.

We know that this may have impacted you immediately and wanted to provide context that this was part of a recent change. We are continually noting any requests for greater dormancy attribute flexibility and sharing with our teams that are working on enhancing product features at GitHub.

With the utmost gratitude,
Dustin & the Sunset Team

cc / @juliekang @adamrr724 @stacycarter