[stevensanderson]

I can so easily relate to this. Although I deal with only a fraction of the GitHub traffic that Jeremy does, it's still demoralising at times, and dominates the effort I spend on OSS. It's the equivalent of every widget owner having the CEO's home number, and it being culturally normal to call to discuss any problem or even idea for minor tweak.

One possibility I've wondered about is making the GitHub issues list read-only, except for project maintainers. Then bug reports and feature requests would go initially only to the project's forum or IRC channel, which has much less maintenance cost, because threads or conversations don't need to be "closed". If they attract enough attention (because they describe a painful bug, or a really good idea), then a project maintainer is likely to notice and choose to file an issue.