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 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