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If you auto-close issues with a stalebot, I will not contribute to your project. Stalebots are incredibly disrespectful towards contributors (and yes, that includes people filing issues - they are contributors too).

@joepie91 I mean you do you, but I consider it more disrespectful to just leave stale issues giving anyone the impression that we'll be doing anything but ignoring the issue. Forever. It will *never* be fixed.

@zkat A stalebot does not solve this issue. If you do not intend to fix an issue after triage, then mark it as "won't fix" and close it. That's fine.

Stalebots have no such insight nor decisionmaking; they just blindly close issues because they've gone quiet, with complete disregard for circumstances, and frequently asking people to do triage work over and over again even though nobody will actually be looking at the outcome.

@joepie91 a stale bot is literally that decision-making process. If I haven't taken care of something in the past 3-6 months, I will almost certainly not take care of it after that.

@zkat @joepie91 It doesn't say that it won't be fixed though. Users are still left with the impression that if they open that issue again, it might get attention eventually. The only information they have is "no one had time yet, issue reaped". That is a significantly different answer from " won't fix"

@shine @joepie91 it *might* get fixed later in the future, if it gets reported again and it happens to be in a window when the dev has time.

But I have literally no use for a 2-year-old issue. I have no guarantee that it's even an issue anymore. And it's a waste of my time to go through each and every one of those and try and reproduce them.

Fresher issues help inform that an issue is still a problem.

@zkat @shine All this boils down to is "instead of wasting my own time on reproducing them, I will expect contributors to do so".

Not to mention that there is a much better solution to this: ask in an issue whether it is still relevant, *if and when you are planning to tackle it*. So that the contributor only has to do that work once, and their work doesn't get thrown into the void.

@joepie91 @shine That's literally what any stale bot I've used actually does. If that's not what the ones you've run into do, then we're talking about different things and this argument is moot.

When I was using a stale bot, it would warn about issue closure in X amount of time, and if a reply happened within that window, the timer got reset. I think that's a good enough model.

@zkat @shine That is not "literally" what stale bots do at all. I understand perfectly well how stalebots work, and that is exactly what I am criticizing.

The problem there is "X amount of time". It doesn't ask people to verify the issue validity *when you plan to fix it*. Instead, it repeatedly asks them to do so, every X time, with no guarantee that anyone will look at the results whatsoever.

If your stalebot is set to 3 months, and it takes you 2 years to get around to fixing an issue, that means that a contributor has been asked eight(!) times to reproduce the issue, and seven of those times that work was entirely for nothing, and effectively discarded.

If you ask for issue validation when you actually plan to fix it instead, they only have to do that work once. And the result of their work is actually looked at.

@joepie91

>instead of wasting my own time on reproducing them, I will expect contributors to do so

The maintainer does not have an obligation to reproduce your issue to begin with.

@Gnuxie They don't, but that doesn't make it any less disrespectful and rude to instead expect a contributor to do that same annoying work *several times* and immediately yeeting the results into the abyss, never to be looked at by anybody. Which is what stalebots do in practice.

This is not respectful of people's time, regardless of circumstances, and completely unnecessary. This whole thing can be entirely avoided by not asking for repro/activity until such a time that the results will actually be considered.

@zkat @joepie91 arguably if you close an issue with a stalebot after months it isn't just an impression that you ignore it. It is the reality. If there was no activity of any kind it clearly wasn't worked on.

@joepie91 on that note: just having a stale bot is enough for me to not use a software. It doesn't even have to affect me. There are obviously some exceptions when there is just no alternative software, it is due to work or I need this immediately. But usually it is a huge red flag and telling me thst the maintainer clearly has a "do not interact with me" opinion.

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