> Don't close bug reports just because they're old. A bug report is either good or bad - that is, the bug is either reproducible or it isn't. A bad bug report is bad from the start; close it quickly - or else, don't close it just because enough time has passed.
And don't lock them as stale once closed. Holy shit, it's infuriating seeing projects abuse what is essentially an anti-harrasment tool to prevent people from pinging old issues with relevant information. Especially if said old issue is a top hit on Google for some set of keywords.
Losing the context of the old issue often kills contributions outright.
Even though I'm maintaining Lock Threads [1], I sometimes shake my head when I come across a closed issue that was locked by it, but I also have to admit that all I want is to ask a question quickly and get the information I need, without considering how my shortcuts affect maintainers.
There may be times when there's a legitimate reason for commenting on a long-resolved issue, but unfortunately most of the comments on closed issues are low effort support requests. Locking them as resolved is the best solution we have so far to avoid spending our time retriaging closed issues.
There’s no special reason maintainers have to respond to (or even read) every comment on some years-old issue.
If maintainers have their email set up to pester them every time someone writes a comment anywhere, that’s the fault of the email setup, not the commenters’ fault.
Instead of locking the topic, consider just leaving a note that future discussion there is likely to be ignored by the team, and then letting users continue to discuss workarounds, etc.; often the issue tracker is the only kind of discussion/help forum available to project users.
I get you. I'm a maintainer as well. But I'm not even talking about "long resolved" issues. Last week I saw an issue created by the maintainer themselves to talk about some upcoming milestone or something, that got autolocked before the milestone got there.
Yes, it's just misconfiguration, but when you're configuring these tools you're never thinking about the damage the autolocks do to your project if you're not very careful with the settings. Remember, the people just get turned off from contributing. They don't stick around to give feedback on this being the root cause.
Hell, I never did, and I'm very vocal about autolocking being toxic.
And don't lock them as stale once closed. Holy shit, it's infuriating seeing projects abuse what is essentially an anti-harrasment tool to prevent people from pinging old issues with relevant information. Especially if said old issue is a top hit on Google for some set of keywords.
Losing the context of the old issue often kills contributions outright.