Boards: add an Incoming status to both boards, adopt the v2 Priority field, and document the triage rubric

Follow-on from the issue-backlog triage in #1872.

Problem

Two gaps surfaced while triaging the 154 unlabeled open issues.

1. There is no board state for "filed but not yet triaged." AGENTS.md defines four Status options — Todo, In Progress, In Review, Done — and describes Todo as "approved-but-not-started work." So a newly filed issue has nowhere to sit that distinguishes nobody has looked at this yet from a maintainer approved it and it is queued. During the sweep this mattered: the 22 issues left open as v2 are awaiting maintainer review, and parking them in Todo would have falsely asserted they were approved.

2. The board's Priority field exists but is unused and undocumented. Board #28 carries a Priority single-select left over from the project template. Zero of the 264 items had it set, AGENTS.md never mentions it, and its options (P0/P1/P2) match no vocabulary used anywhere in the repo. Meanwhile there is no written rule for how to decide that an issue is urgent — priority has been implicit in whoever was triaging.

The work

Add an Incoming Status option to board Add tab and approval flow for server -> client sampling #28, ordered ahead of Todo, for newly filed and untriaged issues. Todo keeps its meaning: maintainer-approved and ready for work.
Adopt the Priority field with the vocabulary Urgent / High / Medium / Low.
Document a scoring rubric so priority is derived rather than asserted: severity (1-5) + urgency/staleness (1-5) + signal bonuses, summed and banded into the four levels.
Document all of it in AGENTS.md — the new Status option in the board recipes table, the Priority field and option IDs alongside the Status ones, and the rubric as its own section.

Notes

Both board mutations are done and verified. updateProjectV2Field full-replaces the option list, so each ran with every existing option's id echoed back; the Status mutation was verified card-by-card afterward (all 264 statuses unchanged, all four prior option IDs preserved). See the hazard callout in AGENTS.md.
The Priority re-option was risk-free in ordering terms because no card had a value set.
The board recipes and their IDs are deliberately not mirrored into .github/copilot-instructions.md — that file is scoped to what a reviewer cites against a diff.

docs: correct the Done option id and harden the deleted-column guidan…

Scope widened to cover the v1 board (#11) as well. Retitled accordingly.

Board #11 had the same gap #28 did — no state for "filed but not yet triaged" — so a v1 security-fix issue had nowhere to sit that didn't assert maintainer approval. Incoming has been added there (831820cf), with all four existing option ids echoed back; a before/after item-list diff confirms all 74 cards kept their Status.

AGENTS.md also carried no v1 board recipes at all, only a link to the project. Anyone boarding a v1 issue had to discover the project and field ids by hand, and was liable to reach for #28's — which are rejected, but only after the attempt. The PR adds a V1 board section with its ids, states that Incoming is the default status for new items on both boards, and records that Priority is v2-only (#11 has no such field).

Two incidental notes:

Three cards on get tools working #11 already carry no Status. That predates this change — confirmed by the before/after diff — and is not evidence of an orphaning event.
The Done option on get tools working #11 is PURPLE, the same colour as In Progress. Cosmetic, and left alone, but it makes the two columns harder to tell apart at a glance than on Add tab and approval flow for server -> client sampling #28 where Done is GRAY.

docs: add Incoming to the v1 board and document its recipes (#1891)

Priority overridden: High → Urgent.

The rubric scored this 11/15 (severity 4 + urgency 4 + 2 signals), landing it in High. Overriding to Urgent per maintainer judgment — recording the reason here, as the rubric itself requires of any override.

The justification: this issue is now load-bearing for the board's own integrity. It carries the Incoming column both boards depend on, the option IDs that recipes are copied from verbatim, and — after the Done deletion incident — the snapshot-and-recover procedure. Until it merges, AGENTS.md documents a Done option ID that no longer exists (248a3910), so anyone following the merge step today fails. That's a documentation defect actively misdirecting work, which the severity axis doesn't capture well: it scores impact on users of the Inspector, and this one's blast radius is the contributor workflow instead.

Also cleared the org-level Fields → Priority value that had been set to Urgent on this issue. That field is a modelcontextprotocol org-wide issue field (IFSS_kgDOAdAWeg, shared with typescript-sdk, servers, registry) and is not the board Priority — nothing syncs the two, which is how this issue came to show Urgent in Fields and High on the board at the same time. The board card is the source of truth; PR #1892 documents the distinction so the next person doesn't have to rediscover it.

docs: distinguish the board Priority from the org-level issue field (#…

docs: mark the org Priority field untrusted and cap it at a +1 signal (…

docs: drop the /15 denominator caveat now the recorded scores are res…

Archive: deleted priority + triage labels

Deleting a label removes it from every issue that carried it, and GitHub keeps no record. This comment is that record, so the deletion stays reversible from a durable location rather than a scratch directory.

Deleted 2026-08-01 as part of this issue: the four p* labels were an earlier, undocumented priority scheme superseded by the board Priority field, and needs-triage was superseded by the Incoming column. Two mechanisms for one decision is how #929 came to carry p1-high while the rubric scored it Medium.

Every affected issue was already closed — verified before deletion, 0 open across all five labels — so nothing in the live queue lost a signal.

Definitions

Label	Colour	Description	Issues
`p0-critical`	`#b60205`	Critical priority - immediate attention required	0
`p1-high`	`#d93f0b`	High priority - should be addressed soon	18
`p2-medium`	`#fbca04`	Medium priority - normal timeline	25
`p3-low`	`#0e8a16`	Low priority - can be addressed when time permits	7
`needs-triage`	`#a35033`	Needs to be triaged by maintainers	14

Which issues carried what

All closed. Listed newest first.

To restore

Recreate each definition with the colour and description above, then re-apply it to the issues listed. Re-applying a label to a closed issue does not reopen it, so a restore would not disturb the #1872 deprecation sweep.

# Example for one label; repeat per row above.
gh api -X POST repos/modelcontextprotocol/inspector/labels \
  -f name='p1-high' -f color='d93f0b' -f description='High priority - should be addressed soon'
for n in <numbers>; do gh issue edit "$n" --repo modelcontextprotocol/inspector --add-label p1-high; sleep 0.5; done

docs: describe the board-option hazard per field, not Status-only (#1891

docs: add Incoming to both boards, adopt the v2 Priority field, and d…

Closed by #1892, squash-merged into v2/main. (Auto-close doesn't fire here — Closes #N only closes on PRs targeting the default branch, and v2 PRs target v2/main.)

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Boards: add an Incoming status to both boards, adopt the v2 Priority field, and document the triage rubric #1891

Problem

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Archive: deleted priority + triage labels

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Boards: add an Incoming status to both boards, adopt the v2 Priority field, and document the triage rubric #1891

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cliffhall commented on Aug 1, 2026

cliffhall commented on Aug 1, 2026

cliffhall commented on Aug 1, 2026

Archive: deleted priority + triage labels

Definitions

Which issues carried what

To restore

cliffhall commented on Aug 2, 2026

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

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Development

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