I get that issue trackers are hard, but I feel like stale bots that *close issues* come off as so hostile. I shouldn't have to come back to the issue tracker every month to confirm, “Yes, this is still an issue!” to prevent the issue from getting closed.
Tag an issue as “stale” for easier triage—that’s fine! But “oops you aren’t engaged enough, sorry, your issue doesn’t exist anymore” feels like a bit of a slap in the face. Especially if it gets closed as “not planned.”
@cassidy The thing is: If an issue doesn't get properly tagged, or none of the maintainer assigns this to their own or someone else, then it in fact IS not planned, and closing it is the next best thing.
@dirk @cassidy I disagree. Just because noone got to the issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Closing it makes it harder for others who run into the same issue to find it, and will only result in duplicates being filed, because it is too easy to assume the issue just came back.
If it is genuinely not considered an issue, yeah, close it. But just because noone got there to triage it, that's not the same thing.
@dirk @algernon @cassidy This is really just a rebranded form of the 'meritocracy' rhetoric and it's wrong for all the same reasons.
There is a wide variety of possible reasons why an issue might not get attention, and many of them are temporary and variable in nature. This is exactly *why* it is important to actually triage issues and, if there is a reason not to address it, be explicit about the reason for that.
Most crucially, *there is not actually a reason* to close issues. An issue being open does not actually affect operations in any meaningful way, unless you are using the "open issues" view as your sole view of the state of a large project, in which case *that* is the problem. Tags and filters do exist for a reason.
@joepie91 @algernon @cassidy We should differentiate between ignored issues and open issues. An open issue is absolutely fine if it is/was not ignored.
If the issue was tagged, or was assigned to a team/person then it's absolutely fine to keep it eternally open, because it was addressed at least once from a mod/dev/triager/etc. and in theory someone could start working on it.
I am not going to blame anyone, but I came across issue trackers where the oldest issues are over a decade old with ZERO interaction. No tags, no comments, no assignments, no nothing. Just a perfectly fine bug report with steps to reproduce, logs, and screenshots.
