Oh no, it's stale-bot! 🤖

I just received my first ever warning of a stale issue from Meteor’s Github repo by stale-bot.

@filipenevola, I personally think stale-bot is a mistake and a recipe for a lot of frustration. Valuable issues, created for a reason, are being buried six feet under.

For example, the one about to be closed, was created by Ben himself.

Just thought I’d say this before the damage is done.

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Yep, I agree with this

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I think github bots like stale-bot can be useful, but it would have been nicer to introduce it, and the process that issues will follow first before marking all our issues as stale.

At least it’s easy to unmark issues as stale with a fresh comment.

It did give me an extra 20 min of work to go through the notifications and mark some as not stale

I can see the reasoning in using stale-bot, but in my experience, You will end up doing that same work many, many times again until you either forget or just give up on keeping the issues not-stale, and in the end everybody suffers (except stale-bot and people happy with “zero issues”) :cry:

I definitely have better things to do (:family_man_woman_girl_boy::sunny::sunflower::beach_umbrella::palm_tree::ocean:), than manually going through n+1 issues I care about trying to fight a bot (My efficiency is limited by the physical world and I have a finite lifespan, the bot doesn’t, or at least doesn’t care).

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Agree with the above. Closing an issue doesn’t make it go away. Even if there’s no time for fixing them, they are filled with discussion and possible workarounds which become harder to find. Especially once people start opening duplicates for the closed issues.

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as someone also maintaining a bit of open source projects, i see the value of stale bot. It can be annoying, but it helps maintainers to

1.) decrease issue count, which helps to

  • focus on important stuff
  • reduce noise
  • increase trust in the repo

2.) increase activity from users

  • if the issue is still relevant, they will probably answer and unstale the issue
  • or the issue is already resolved or not relevant anymore and they maybe will close the issue by themself or let the stale bot close it

i also received some notifcations from the stalebot now and most of them are indeed not relevant for me anymore, so i closed them or added a message why i think it is still relevant

Valuable issues, created for a reason, are being buried six feet under.

this is already the case if more issues are filed that are beeing close.

Hi, stale bot is not going to close every issue, I just added this to issue triage explaining the settings that are in place.

The idea is just to have confirmed issues in the repo, otherwise it’s only going to grow, we want to have a list of actionable items or items being classified yet. If in the end this cause more pain than benefits we can change it but I would like to try.

BTW, we need to update the people here meteor/CONTRIBUTING.md at devel · meteor/meteor · GitHub

Issue Triagers is one of the roles.

If you want to have any of these roles let me know.

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I see two problems currently with stale bot:

  • It seems it marks stale after a month of inactivity. I have commented on an issue one month ago and now I got a message that it is again marked as stale. That is pretty low. Maybe three months?
  • It doesn’t count upvotes or subscribing to the issue as activity. So if somebody is just upvoting instead of commenting because they see issue still relevant, which is generally seen as best practice, this does not count. So stale bot encourages +1 comments.
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I’m willing to help out with triaging. I’m usually reading all the issues anyways so I would be happy to review the filed issues when I can and ask clarifying questions if they are necessary and try some reproductions provided.

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I’ve been fighting with the stale bot in other OSS projects, notably Gatsby. After people repeatedly reply to an issue in order to unstale it, the comments are littered with old stale-bot warnings. When I attempted to delete that clutter, I was threatened to be kicked out of the org.

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Update about stale-bot: Stale bot out, new labels in 🏷️

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I applaud this decision :partying_face:

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