In my experience (not just here but within Zulip, Wikimedia, Mailman,
and other projects), this depends on the project's maintainers.
If maintainers actively put the word out that a project is seeking new
volunteers, respond to new questions and patches within a few days, and
comment on finished issues to say "great! want another?", volunteers
work through the "good first issues" queue steadily and it needs regular
replenishment. It is worth taking a fresh look at the queue every month
or two to double-check whether any of the open issues labelled "good
first issue" are harder than they first appeared, then remove the label
with an explanatory comment.
(My further advice on stuff like this -- "How To Improve Bus Factor In
Your Open Source Project", "How to Teach And Include Volunteers who
Write Poor Patches", "Inclusive-Or: Hospitality in Bug Tracking", etc.
-- are at my resources page
https://changeset.nyc/resources.html .)
On 04/13/2018 11:32 AM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:
> Do these kind of issues ever linger on unreasonably, or do enough
> voluneteers step up to keep them low? Do you expire that label after a few
> months?
>
> I don't have any feedback on your actual request, I'm mostly curious of the
> process/interplay around feeding new users work without introduce excessive
> delay or otherwise.
>
> Thanks,