Nothing infuriates me more than googling for a problem I’m having and finding a relevant issue that’s been closed by a bot as “stale”.

I _get_ that I don’t have any right to free maintenance, but the stale bot paints some veneer of process around a maintainer thinking “issue looks hard, doesn’t affect me, so I don’t care”. I would just so much prefer them to be honest and just say that rather than passive-aggressively send me emails every 30 days warning that my issue is becoming stale or whatever.

I thought stalebot was supposed to back down if people were commenting. But this time it added a "wontfix" tag right away, ignored the humans and closed the issue anyway. The scourge is getting worse.

It's not even about expecting free development and fixes, it's about mutual respect.

I respect that a developer doesn't have to fix an issue I report, but it's only fair that the time I spent on gathering information and reporting the issue is respected. It should be triaged, valid reports should be marked as such and if it's never gonna be dealt with then it should be closed.

Not some kind of software development equivalent of stringing someone along as a side b***ch.

> stringing someone along as a side b***ch

Side blotch? Side bleach?

I'd prefer they just leave them alone and open.

This sort of "ADHD-driven development" that heavily biases towards novelty and ease over quality and stability is a real problem with a lot of software today.

Of the issues I've replied to, closed by the stale bot, they've been reopened.

And still you shouldn't have had to reply to those issues to keep them open.

A small team with nearly 1000 open tickets needs a way to manage those issues which are genuinely stale.

It's called triaging your tickets, not letting a bot roam free hoping to catch someone that didn't press a button at the right time.

It's disrespectful to the reporters' time and effort to keep pestering them with an inane bot. It doesn't fix the issues reported. It just makes the bot owner feel good that they have fewer tickets open.

I agree on most of your points but triaging requires resources - setting up a bot to quickly close stale issues is a poor stopgap but it seems they felt they had to do something.

Why not? It seems like a reasonable way to prioritize fixing issues that people actually care about.