Stalebot is closing tickets after too short a time

[fresheneesz]

Stalebot seems to come through a mere 3 months after the last activity on a ticket and threaten to close it unless activity is made. This is far too short. Valid issues are being automatically closed simply because they aren't a top priority. Can someone please fix stalebot to have a longer timeout?

[ripcurlx]

I'm not sure if it would just help to increase the timeframe e.g. to 4 or 5 months as development resources will always be a bottleneck. The idea behind using stalebot was to have a pretty clean list of issues without too much noise. At the moment issues with following labels:
- a:bug
- re:security
- re:privacy
- re:Tor
- in:dao
- $BSQ bounty
- good first issue
- Epic
are excluded from the stale check. Maybe we could/should extend this list to include other tags, that are applied right now (e.g. a:feature,...) as well. Are you referring to a specific issue?

[fresheneesz]

I'm referring to a number of issues I was subscribed to where I saw stalebot try to close them or actually close them. A couple that I created are #3308 and #3017. I've seen notifications about stalebot a lot in my inbox. Its very common for an issue to remain valid for years. Simply closing bugs that haven't had activity in 3 months is not a good way to prioritize the work. Since people often only look through open tickets (and ignore closed tickets), having an open bug fosters discussion around the issue, where a closed issue may cause people having the same issue to not find it, or even if they do find it, assume that it isn't taken seriously and so isn't worth commenting on. Some people are too lazy to create their own issue tickets.

Its good some tags exclude tickets from being stalebotted, and I do think it would be a good idea to extend the list to include other tags, like you're suggesting. I do see that the issues are pretty well tagged. But I would still recommend increasing the timeframe. Dev resources will of course always be a bottleneck, and therefore you need to prioritize, but why not tag things with priority levels in that case rather than simply having the essentially binary priority of either closed or open?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[cd2357]

The bot fights back :)

[cd2357]

@fresheneesz I agree its not a good idea to auto-close issues.

[p3yot3]

The microsoft bots are taking over!

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically closed because of inactivity. Feel free to reopen it if you think it is still relevant.

[chimp1984]

Finally the bot won. ;-)