[dudleypippin]

It’s quite discouraging to stumble upon a well-written bug report that matches exactly an issue I’m having and see that it’s been “sent away”.

I’m not getting angry, per se, but more disappointed and concerned that the project might not have enough resources to make me feel comfortable using it in the way I intended. (The one I’m thinking of was a cross-cloud app that obviously got more love on AWS than GCP. I got the feeling from the staled bugs that GCP was the “red-headed stepchild”, so we phased that app out after the POC.)

I like the “bug reports are signals, not tasks” idea, though. As a user, I’ll keep that in mind and see if that helps change my gut reaction to the stalebot.

[geerlingguy]

Welcome to open source. Even projects that don't use the stale bot and let open issues rot forever "don't have enough resources". Case in point, look at projects like Drupal, with tens of thousands of open issues, a large portion of which are verifiable bugs.

The problem is those bugs don't affect the right people to have them care about fixing them, so they'll just sit there open forever.

At least the stale bot would signal "as a community of developers, this issue doesn't have enough interest or priority to get fixed".