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Comment by xrisk | Hacker News Reader

Is that because they don’t use a bot to auto-close issues like a lot of other projects?

That annoys the crap out of me. Closing stale issues doesn’t make the issues go away, it just means that edge cases aren’t addressed. If I have an issue and find myself in a stale-closed issue, I’m not even going to bother reporting it. I’m either going to look for a different library altogether, one that actually tries to solve edge cases; or I’m going to create my own library as a big middle-finger to the project. At work, I’ll just open a new issue, which will probably just be ignored.

And arguably we’re where we are because people have this idea that issue counts are comparable between projects.

I see this way of thinking around CVEs too. I think it’s a mistake of making data-driven decisions based on noise rather than signals. It sounds good when you have a comparative number to go on.

I see open issues as a pretty good signal that people are using the software and people care about its development, but maybe the number of contributors is too small. In these cases, I might even open the PR myself. Issues without replies though is probably the worst signal you can send as a maintainer. Closing issues without replying and letting a stale bot passively aggressively close issues is probably tied, but it’s usually hidden away.

Yeah, I stopped reporting issues to projects when I have seen tons of stale bot closed issues. Those were real bugs, still really in the codebase, just no one fixed it for arbitrary short time.

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