Ancestors

Toot

Written by Deborah Pickett on 2025-02-06 at 08:54

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.

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Descendants

Written by Deborah Pickett on 2025-02-06 at 08:55

Most recent project that did this to me: Funkwhale.

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Written by OSIRIS on 2025-02-06 at 08:59

@futzle Stale bots should work the other way around. If noone has addressed an issue it should be propelled to the top of the list with increased prio.

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Written by Rihards Olups on 2025-02-06 at 11:51

@osiris @futzle That would be like avoiding the ditch of community alienation, oversteering and crashing in the maintainer burnout wall :)

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Written by AlgoCompSynth by znmeb on 2025-02-06 at 09:03

@futzle Indeed ... the bug triage people need to close bugs quickly with WONTFIX and a project-priority-based reason rather then let them sit around and get harvested by a bot.

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Written by Sergio on 2025-02-06 at 09:53

@futzle Unfortunately sometimes developers do not know how to or do not care enough to fix an issue by themselves and seeing tons of open issues that are very old and no one knows if got fixed by other contribution can overload the developers and discourage code contribution.

It is a shame your contribution fell into the void, but that's the nature of a darwinistic attention-seeker project, that's the nature of Unix-like-ware.

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Written by wirepair on 2025-02-06 at 09:55

@futzle indeed, labels are free

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Written by ajft on 2025-02-06 at 10:11

@futzle grrrr. Taking after a few too many corporates. "This ticket has been open too long and we are closing it, if the issue still exists, please open a new ticket" <- how to avoid the KPI that gets narky at problem not fixed in X weeks

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Written by bigiain on 2025-02-06 at 23:08

@ajft @futzle I see a great need...

A stalebotbot. When you open a ticket, you feed it to the list for your stalebotbot, which checks it every day. If it's been closed by a stalebot it opens two new almost identical tickets, and then adds them both to the stalebotbot list.

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Written by ajft on 2025-02-06 at 23:10

@bigiain @futzle ah, a kind of sorcerers apprentice bot, I like your thinking

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Written by Bart Louwers on 2025-02-06 at 10:21

@futzle Some people see a lot of issues as a bad sign. 🤷‍♂️

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Written by Snow Jo ❄️ :v_enby: 💫 on 2025-02-06 at 13:35

@futzle https://nostalebots.xyz

i also just use this site link when bumping stalebot replies

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Written by Numerfolt on 2025-02-06 at 14:07

@futzle I have to agree.

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Written by Mark Stosberg on 2025-02-06 at 17:14

@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.

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Written by Hugh on 2025-02-06 at 18:28

@futzle yes they are extraordinarily obnoxious and unhelpful even to the “core” dev teams. I have never understood their purpose unless it is to allow maintainers to not have to choose “wont-fix” explicitly.

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Written by Hugh on 2025-02-06 at 18:35

@futzle Actually looking at more of your replies I see this also seems to solve the problem of “core team is disorganised, doesn’t triage any issues, and doesn’t understand how to use labels effectively”.

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Written by Andreas, DJ3EI, he/him on 2025-02-07 at 00:42

An open source success story:

In an open source project (rsyslogd, if you care), I had opened a feature request in March 2016. Worked around its missing ever since. A dupe was opened and duly closed same year. In 2018, the feature was implemented, but nobody told me. Today, some random fellow user commented in the ticket it could be closed, triggering mail for me. The documentation claimed my feature was implemented, so I closed my 2016 ticket. I can remove my old workaround now.

🙂

@futzle

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