Settings for GitHub bot.

[Kralizek]

The bot has a really unhealthy setup trying to close issues that haven't been solved yet just because nobody has replied to them for a year.

Is it really healthy to close bug reports just because nobody has the time to properly address them?

[Kralizek]

@ashishdhingra @normj not sure if you guys are monitoring discussions. :)

[ashovlin]

I was able to chat with @kellertk internally who works on https://github.com/aws-actions/stale-issue-cleanup

Our current thinking across AWS SDK repos:

• The bot is configured to close issues that have been open for an entire year since their last update. A year is a very long time and in our estimation. Any update on the issue at all (from the perspective of the GitHub API) resets this timer.
• We expect that issues that are that old either aren’t important to the submitter anymore or need to be reevaluated in the current context.
• We put a message on the issue telling the submitter if it’s still a problem that they should open a new issue with up to date details.
• The expectation is that the team should either be putting some kind of update on extremely long running issues – as in “we have nothing more to share but we’re still considering this” or “we don’t intend to implement this” or “we have this planned but no ETA right now” at least once per year. And if that can’t happen, there’s an automation exempt label we can stick on the issue again so that it won’t be closed at all.
  • But based on my GitHub inbox with what issues were automatically closed over the weekend, we could be doing a better job here on the .NET repos.
• Having a huge backlog of possibly invalid issues is confusing to customers. We ask that users review open issues before submitting a new one, and that’s simply not realistic when there are hundreds of very old, very stale issues. So we’re honest with users by closing ones that in theory we’re never getting to anyway.

Hope that help understands our current process.

[Kralizek]

Thanks for the explanation.

It's just baffling that issues tagged with "bugs" by maintainers need to be refreshed unless you assume that bugs can be solved in PRs that don't tag relevant issues.

I agree with you that having a long list of open issues is counter productive, but assuming an issue is current just because someone adds some kind of +1 seems over optimistic. Same goes for the expectation of the team refreshing long running feature requests.

Also, in 1 year the person who created the issue might have moved to a new project/company, so they might not care/be invested enough into +1-ing the issue just to keep it from being marked stale.

[ashishdhingra]

@Kralizek There is an update now where ancient issues would not be auto-closed by stale-issue-cleanup GitHub action.