Big fan of everything Jeff has put out over the years, having found him back in the day by way of his large catalog of Ansible materials.

One request: please dont advocate for stale bot :( I understand the tension between maintainers sanity and developers sanity, but there has to be a better way. It is absolutely _maddening_ as the consumer to interact with a stale-bot enabled repository. Please, just manually close the issues as 'wontfix' and link to this blog post instead.

Eh, as a burnt-out maintainer I have to say I can understand the use of stalebot and don't begrudge people using it at all.

When I started my project, I had the attitude that I'd be better than all these other maintainers. They flaked out but I'm just that much better that I'd never let the project wither.

But over time the backlog of things you're just not going to get to, or don't have enough information but you don't have time or motivation to go through composing a reply, begins to cause a genuine psychic pain. To the point you can't even open the repository because it's a reminder of all the ways you're failing.

So I think it's good advice that maintainers should use stalebot, because the alternative is a dead project.

Sure, it sucks that the issue you put time and effort into gets memory-holed but you're owed nothing for the time, as TFA says, fork it.

Edit: Even manually closing as wontfix is that much more work, you're asking for every issue in the backlog the maintainer does the emotional work of deciding that the issue is unsalvageable from their perspective and takes a manual action that will potentially get people mad at them and now they have to deal with being flamed. Closed issues are still searchable and preserved in the issue backlog, they don't disappear forever.

Why not just close issue tracker? Or autoclose everything immediately rather than remind people weeks/months later about their bug, just to discover that they got "pranked"?

Or let issues pile up? Or have separate garbage dump issue tracker? Done by https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock