If your open source project uses “stale bots” to close issues after a period of inactivity, I am not going to participate in your project.
These bots do nothing to help issues be fixed. What they do is put undue pressure on the author of an issue to come up with a fix themselves, or to discount issues raised by people who are not familiar with the language or toolset used by the project.
I can report a bug, well, without writing a single line of code. If your stale bot closes it, you didn’t want the bug report. Happy to oblige.
@futzle I’ve spent a lot of time in open source both as a user and a maintainer. I’ve had issues closed by stalebot and been frustrated.
But on the other side, as a maintainer of a popular project, I started think it may be a good fit. If literally no one interacts with a ticket for six months, that’s a strong signal of low user impact and low developer interest. It’s the kind of issue I often manually close later. If that work was automated, my time could be higher impact.
@markstos @futzle The problem here is closing an issue for a still-existing problem to begin with, whether it's automated or manual is besides the point really.
An open issue costs nothing if you have a halfway decent workflow (eg. having some kind of sorting metric to prioritize work, and communicating that not all issues may be solved).
@markstos @futzle The underlying point here is that there are a lot of ways to deal with the situation of "too many problems to fix" and stalebots (or manual approximations of them) is probably literally the least-respectful-to-contributors option at your disposal.