Stalebot on djangoproject.com issues

[Tim Graham]

Hello,

In October 2022, a stalebot was activated for djangoproject.com issues:

https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/issues/1219

https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/pull/1220

It comments on an issue if there's no activity in the last six months: "This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions."

The bot closes the issue if there's no activity in the next seven days.

I didn't see much discussion among the djangproject.com team outside of the issue and PR,  but the rationale from the issue is this: "Idea copied from DRF PR #8423 - Add a StaleBot, configured with the lowest possible run limit. The intent here is to help us sweep through the issue and pull request backlog, and review what does and does not need to remain open at this point in time."

Here is what I said at the time: "I think this is a lame way to handle old issues. The result seems to be Carlton triaging all issues that the bot comments on. You could have asked him to do that without a bot adding noise. Should a useless "issue still valid" comment be required every 180 days? Why not have a human triage each issue now that more people are maintaining this site? Using a bot comes off to me as passive aggressive. Why try to automatically discard years of issues (even if minor)? It's not like the passage of time or lack of activity means the problem went away. A responsible reporter will look through existing issues so they don't report a duplicate and not necessarily leave a comment like "issue still valid." If we close the issue automatically, what did that accomplish? I would think triaging issues would be a good way for new team members to develop their understanding of the site. If you're feeling unknowledgable about an old issue, feel free to ping me for advice. I hope you might reconsider the usefulness of the bot."

It's six months later, and I'm now having to again comment on inactive issues "stalebot, please don't close." to keep valid issues open.

Paolo Melchiorre (author of this initiative) says, "activating the stalebot last year allowed us to close many old issues. I think an issue opened 7 years ago should be closed if no one takes care of it despite two reminders in the last year. As the removal of the stalebot is not only up to me, I think it is worth discussing it in a separate issue or on the developer mailing list."

I remain of the opinion that continued attempts to automatically abandon valid issues are not helpful and do not reflect project maintenance best practices. I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter. Thanks!

[Sarah Boyce]

From what it sounds, I guess the main value was prompting a one time spring clean. As there are not that many issues open in djangoproject.com and all issues will have been re-validated, I think it makes sense to remove it to reduce this additional burden/frustration.

There are configurations around stale PR closing which I think makes more sense in general (maybe not for djangoproject.com as there are not many PRs), as other people might be reluctant to work on something if there is an open PR and it prompts someone to decide if they want to come back to this if they have just forgotten for example.

[Adam Johnson]

I agree that we should remove Stalebot. Closing old issues doesn't fix them or provide a reason why they aren’t going to be worked on.

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