On stale bot issue triaging

This post is a response to some of the backlash we faced enabling stale bot on the nyc repo in IstanbulJS. I wrote these responses in the issue linked below, and I just wanted to thread it all here. #

As a maintainer/triager it’s overwhelming when there are many issues open because I don’t know at a glance what’s most important to people since I’m not on the project full time. In the short of amount of time since adding the stale bot we’ve seen some healthy movement IMHO because the people who have the most vested interest and are actively contributing are responding and helping move the project forward. One maintainer countered with this point:

Labels serve that purpose without sending users the message that you don’t care about their issue. https://github.com/istanbuljs/nyc/issues/515#issuecomment-451716467

I don’t think that’s the message being sent. In fact, labels don’t create a notification, which in turn can lead to issues being forgotten about (again, when this isn’t your full time job), which sends the message that the user’s issue isn’t cared about. Stale bot does the opposite, IMHO, it says I care enough to follow up or ask for more information before I go to prioritize more active development. Their readme puts it pretty well:

To some, a robot trying to close stale issues may seem inhospitable or offensive to contributors. But the alternative is to disrespect them by setting false expectations and implicitly ignoring their work. This app makes it explicit: if work is not progressing, then it’s stale. A comment is all it takes to keep the conversation alive.

We could probably bikeshed our different opinions forever, so I’m going to stop here. I did want to explicitly address “you don’t care about their issue[s]” and basically rebuke that. We do care about these issues, and are taking steps to get to as many as are reasonable that we are able to get to.