[josephg]

No way. The point of an issue tracker is to be a todo list of bugs and features for the project. Its right there in the name - issue tracker. Ideally when a bug is fixed, I can mark the issue as FIXED and move on to the next one.

Questions in an issue tracker are like rocks in my shoes. You have to work around them, and they bug you (the developer), not the person who put the rock there. When can a maintainer close a question-issue? Never - because whether a question has been resolved is up to the person asking, not the person answering. As a maintainer, if half the open issues in an issue tracker are questions, my "open issues list" is suddenly completely useless. And this is really common because lots of people asking questions will disappear and never never close the issue once the question has been answered.

User questions are important, but the github issue tracker isn't the right place for them. If you want to take notes but the only paper you can find is my todo list, its still not ok to take notes in my todo list. Github issues is the same.

[roblabla]

The way i deal with those is by closing the issue immediately after answering. If the user still has a follow up question, he is free to leave a comment, and I'll get notified he does.