¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Drew DeVault:

One of GitHub’s “recommended” marketplace features is the “stale” bot. The purpose of this bot is to automatically close GitHub issues after a period of inactivity, 60 days by default. You have probably encountered it yourself in the course of your work.

This is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

I’m not sure what motivates maintainers to install this on their repository, other than the fact that GitHub recommends it to them. Perhaps it’s motivated by a feeling of shame for having a lot of unanswered issues? If so, this might stem from a misunderstanding of the responsibilities a maintainer has to their project. You are not obligated to respond to every issue, implement every feature request, or fix every bug, or even acknowledge them in any way.

I second this. It’s not a “shame” to accumulate issues. Just set expectations accordingly.

Lately I’ve been encountering various CNCF projects that employ it, and it’s simply awful.

I do not have anything else to add; Drew pretty much nails it.