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sudomesh / projects

A place to define candidate projects, collaborate on their definition, and document project outcomes.
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Proposal: Add stale issues bot to sudomesh repos? In the interest of making projects easier to manage, appear less abandoned to new devs, and trigger email reminders to semi-active people to stay engaged on issues they've filed (or close them). e.g. https://github.com/probot/stale #2

Open gobengo opened 6 years ago

gobengo commented 6 years ago

Is closing stale issues really a good idea? In an ideal world with infinite resources, there would be no need for this app.

But in any successful software project, there's always more work to do than people to do it. As more and more work piles up, it becomes paralyzing. Just making decisions about what work should and shouldn't get done can exhaust all available resources. In the experience of the maintainers of this app—and the hundreds of other projects and organizations that use it—focusing on issues that are actively affecting humans is an effective method for prioritizing work.

To some, a robot trying to close stale issues may seem inhospitable or offensive to contributors. But the alternative is to disrespect them by setting false expectations and implicitly ignoring their work. This app makes it explicit: if work is not progressing, then it's stale. A comment is all it takes to keep the conversation alive.

https://github.com/probot/stale#is-closing-stale-issues-really-a-good-idea

gobengo commented 6 years ago

I had taken an action about a month ago to investigate whether there was a way we could have the 'reminder' benefits of a bot without having to actually close issues. It would appear that probot has a flag to just label issues as 'stale' (and still send email reminders before then) without actually closing them.

https://github.com/probot/stale README describes

# Number of days of inactivity before a stale Issue or Pull Request is closed.
# Set to false to disable. If disabled, issues still need to be closed manually, but will remain marked as stale.
daysUntilClose: 7