For example; the Angular repository has a "stale bot", which closes and locks the issue after a certain amount of time of inactivity.
This sounds great on the surface, however it's insane in practice. The users constantly need to recreate duplicate issues, as the original issue is locked. Most of the duplicates are not linked, so maintainers can't determine which issues are duplicates. And it also increases the friction of users notifying that the issue is still occurring.
Basically the result of "stale bots" is more duplicate issues and less engagement on old issues (as they're locked)
Moral of the story, use bots in moderation
That speaks to another issue of open source - it's more common than not for a user to report an issue with no intention of following up, nor helping to triage (let alone contributing). Drive-by issues are noise and take precious time away from maintainers. There again, stalebot steps in to help. YMMV but my personal experience is that we don't get too many reopens, and we don't get too many duplicates from closed issues.
I strongly disagree. Follow-up and collaboration are great, but someone taking the time to write a decent bug report is also valuable.
"library X fails with this input" is great, unless the input is wrong, the usage is wrong, or the environment is awry - and those issues are useless if the author doesn't reply to follow up replies.
> "library X fails with this input" is great, unless the input is wrong, the usage is wrong, or the environment is awry - and those issues are useless if the author doesn't reply to follow up replies.
They could still be a hint that the documentation or reported error could be clearer.
In addition, it's just plain rude. If you don't have time to fix it, that's valid, but what makes you presume you community has time to deal with constant bot reminders on order to keep the bug open?
You don't have to deal with it, that's fine, leave it there. Or get some more maintainers on board to help with triage.
Multiple times have I filed an issue, that collects many people's "me too" and workarounds for over a year. And every month, stalebot comes and mentions everybody, so that I have to go and type in that stalebot command.
Until one day I give up, because I don't want to get those notifications anymore, or because I move to a more active project. The issue gets closed even though multiple people are affected, and all they can do is open a new one, link to the workarounds somehow, and take over the duty of fighting the bot.
Why make everyone do this? You say you don't owe me anything, but that's different from taking active step to hurt your community.
(and by you I mean stalebot users like andrew_)
We owe you nothing. You owe us nothing.
Play by the rules set in the project, fork, or don't play. The choice is yours.
IIRC, Gentoo does this, and my first patch was rejected multiple times. But because it was a bot that responded,I just felt like I had made a mistake, whereas with a human in the mix I probably would've asked a bunch of a questions and wasted her time and mine.
If you can't take a few extra seconds to enter information in a template, why on earth should maintainers donate their time to you to triage what you're reporting?
As for the original point: I suspect every developer has encountered a bug in their code that couldn't possibly be caused by something, but ultimately was. Getting all the information requested up front in a regularly structured way, even when we think it's irrelevant, can make tracking these problems much easier.