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.
>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.
