we had made agreements 1.5 years ago or longer to have triage owners manage needswork:owner and we planned to ignore it. People and processes change all the time, so I think we should remove the :owner portion of this and treat all stockwell bugs as needing sheriffs to use the needinfo flag.

you can see references to needswork_owner in the treeherder github repo:
https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder/search?q=needswork%3Aowner&unscoped_q=needswork%3Aowner

Are triage owners complaining? ...or not triaging effectively?

Note that part of needswork:owner is to change the bug priority to --, so that the intermittent bug will be triaged just like other bugs in the component; that does not apply to non-owner needswork processing.

:gijs has had some problems, and I know triage owners have changed hands in the last year, let alone the last 2 years. I want to make sure the sheriffs needinfo people before disabling.

(In reply to Geoff Brown [:gbrown] from comment #2)

Are triage owners complaining? ...or not triaging effectively?

Note that part of needswork:owner is to change the bug priority to --, so that the intermittent bug will be triaged just like other bugs in the component; that does not apply to non-owner needswork processing.

The standard triage queries that got handed down explicitly excluded intermittents filed by the intermittent bug filer bugzilla account, so that didn't help, no. Also, those queries tend to ignore bugs that haven't been changed in the last N days or were filed before cutoff date X, which excludes older intermittents that suddenly spike. Sadly, there seems to be no standard for these triage queries.

In any case, I think longterm it'd be better to needinfo people before disabling, and go ahead with disabling unless there's a response within a few days, for all components.

That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.