<story><title>GitHub stale bot considered harmful</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2021/10/26/stalebot.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quadrifoliate</author><text>In my experience, these auto-closing bots are the natural result of software development workflows that treat &lt;i&gt;issues&lt;/i&gt; as &lt;i&gt;tasks to be closed&lt;/i&gt;, rather than a &lt;i&gt;data point&lt;/i&gt; that a user is experiencing a problem of some kind (maybe they are doing things wrong, expecting something the project doesn&amp;#x27;t provide, or triggering a real problem – the exact cause is immaterial).&lt;p&gt;This treatment of issue-as-a-task is made worse by corporate micromanagement frameworks like Agile, which encourage metrics on how many of these issues-as-tasks are closed, which leads to ill-advised features like this that close them automatically because &amp;quot;Duh, no one said anything in 30 days&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If I were to design this myself, I would argue that the correct way to treat an issue is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to have it have a closed or open state at all. If the issue spawns a task or related tasks, you can close &lt;i&gt;those&lt;/i&gt;. Or you can provide feedback on the issue that states that it is invalid. The user has already experienced a problem or wants a feature, there is no value in putting a red label that indicates &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m done with this, please go away&amp;quot;. It unnecessarily invalidates the experience of users who have their provided valuable time to report something to your software project. I think this is similar to the approach used by forums like Discourse, where a thread about a problem will usually not be closed or locked, but will just age out of current discussion if nobody brings it up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franciscop</author><text>As a OSS author, the problem is that other developers &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; treat issues as tasks. If you look at anywhere or any kind of rubric that tries to measure the &amp;quot;health&amp;quot; of a repository, things like the number or lifetime of issues play an important role. Even npm shows publicly (open) &amp;quot;Issues&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Pull Requests&amp;quot;. Well, if my project is working as intended, I like that people look at it and see the &amp;quot;Issues&amp;quot; count to be as close to 0 as possible.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I&amp;#x27;m so excited&amp;#x2F;hopeful about Github Discussions, that seems like it was a huge hole in the whole Github and finally being addressed. A place to ask questions, meta questions, show YOUR issues using the library, etc. just a place to have conversations around the library. So you can leave the Issues for bug reports&amp;#x2F;potential issues.&lt;p&gt;I closed the Issues tab in two of my most popular libraries because they just got low quality questions where devs were expecting me&amp;#x2F;others to basically fix their code&amp;#x2F;do their homework.</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub stale bot considered harmful</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2021/10/26/stalebot.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quadrifoliate</author><text>In my experience, these auto-closing bots are the natural result of software development workflows that treat &lt;i&gt;issues&lt;/i&gt; as &lt;i&gt;tasks to be closed&lt;/i&gt;, rather than a &lt;i&gt;data point&lt;/i&gt; that a user is experiencing a problem of some kind (maybe they are doing things wrong, expecting something the project doesn&amp;#x27;t provide, or triggering a real problem – the exact cause is immaterial).&lt;p&gt;This treatment of issue-as-a-task is made worse by corporate micromanagement frameworks like Agile, which encourage metrics on how many of these issues-as-tasks are closed, which leads to ill-advised features like this that close them automatically because &amp;quot;Duh, no one said anything in 30 days&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If I were to design this myself, I would argue that the correct way to treat an issue is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to have it have a closed or open state at all. If the issue spawns a task or related tasks, you can close &lt;i&gt;those&lt;/i&gt;. Or you can provide feedback on the issue that states that it is invalid. The user has already experienced a problem or wants a feature, there is no value in putting a red label that indicates &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m done with this, please go away&amp;quot;. It unnecessarily invalidates the experience of users who have their provided valuable time to report something to your software project. I think this is similar to the approach used by forums like Discourse, where a thread about a problem will usually not be closed or locked, but will just age out of current discussion if nobody brings it up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pydry</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s ironic that github sold itself as &amp;quot;social coding&amp;quot; coz while the design was pretty and the usability is good the social aspects are almost programmed to bring the worst out in people.&lt;p&gt;Their review workflow, for instance, is innately structured as a dehumanizing pipeline for delivering soundbites of impersonal criticism that Must Be Attended To.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that it will ruin your relationships if you work with good people or vice versa but I&amp;#x27;ve seen bad blood and insecurities exacetbated by the workflow that were unnecessary.</text></comment>