Reading up on the comments to that complaint about stalebots, and once again finding that there is a significant amount of people who do not recognize carefully-filed and detailed issues as a type of contribution, because it's not a code patch.
I have Opinions about this mindset and none of them are positive.
@joepie91 as someone who has reviewed way too many issue reports with absolutely no useful information... Yeah, it has to be work because else people would just do it.
@joepie91
Yes, agreed!
A good bug report is
a) Super valuable to the dev team. We can't meet a need we can't properly understand
b) Really goddamn hard. Understanding and articulating your need so the devs understand it fully is a complex communication task, and almost everyone is actually really bad at this.
c) Rare as hen's teeth. Most reports and requests (mine included) are pretty much terrible.
@silvermoon82 @joepie91 I have only offered that kind of response once. I have a package that interfaces to a class of services. One of the providers of those services highlighted my package somewhere, and shortly thereafter a vendor I don't support dropped into say I should support them too. These are commercial services that run on a freemium model, so I asked them if they were going to contribute funds or code.
That issue remains open. 😉
@joepie91 yeah, stale bots are designed for a type of issue which is actually not very common, but assumed to be common by maintainers who think that all their users are incompetent
"help it crashed, idk why" is the only kinda issue that is liable to get stale, but actually relatively uncommon since the intersection of people who will bother to file an issue and don't provide detailed information and want to follow up is basically empty
@clarfonthey Well I wouldn't say it's entirely empty, but it's certainly a lot smaller than it's often made out to be, and I do often see maintainers misattributing "people get fed up with a lack of maintainer response and leave" as "this user never intended to clarify anything".
More crucially, a stalebot cannot reliably distinguish between the two cases of "user does not follow up" vs. "maintainer has not gotten around to it" and that's what makes it a terrible non-solution to an otherwise legitimate problem.
@joepie91 I should clarify, when I said "basically empty" I meant "diminishingly small for some projects," as in I agree with you and think I probably should have been more nuanced in my response
you're right that bots cannot distinguish this case and that they cause more harm than good
Not unsurprisingly, in my experience this mindset also strongly correlates with "not recognizing *any* non-code work as a type of contribution", as applied to documentation, design/graphics fixes, community management, and so on.