Add nuance to how stale works to encourage interaction from Maintainers in situations where contributors follow all the guidelines about stale HOT 18 CLOSED

I believe the first-pass of stale-bot interacting with an issue should be prompting both the user and the maintainers for any more action

I fully agree with this, and I'm happy to say that it's actually already possible with the bot's current functionality -- it just isn't the default.

In the tldr-pages project we ended up creating a configuration file that gets the bot from this:

@probot-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.
Label: wontfix

(7 days later) @probot-stale closed #1234.

to this:

@probot-stale: "Hi all! This thread has not had any recent activity.
Are there any updates? Thanks!"
Label: waiting

(30 days later)
@probot-stale: "Hi everyone.
This thread is being closed as there was no response to the previous prompt.
However, please leave a comment whenever you're ready to resume, so the thread can be reopened. Thanks again!"
@probot-stale closed #1234.

Of note:

• the difference in days between the heads-up and the actual closing
• the friendlier tone of messages
• the less final-sounding label (cf. #74)
• the addressing of both contributors and maintainers
• the addition of a message when closing
• the suggestion of possibility of reopening

from stale.

Is this still relevant? If so, please comment with any updates or addition details.

from stale.

I think the default message could be improved to better convey the situation and intention behind marking issues as stale, without actually needing context about first-time contributors or anything like that.

Consider the default message:

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.

This hits the hopeful submitter with two short negative statements, and then a very formal "thank you" which feels a bit like a business-like euphemism for "go away" when following an already negative message. There is no direct call to action, and an inexperienced submitter may interpret it as telling them that the issue will now be closed, while an experienced submitter may just be annoyed.

I think that just by offering the submitter something to do, the message takes a much friendlier tone:

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity, and will be closed if no further activity occurs. If this issue was overlooked, forgotten, or should remain open for any other reason, please reply here to call attention to it and remove the stale status. Thank you for your contributions.

from stale.

@waldyrious yes, that'd be great!

from stale.

Is this still relevant?

Yes.

If so, what is blocking it?

PR #162 needs to be merged. It has no outstanding review issues.

Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

I just noticed that the PR had broken tests. I fixed them.

from stale.

I find it typical that the stale bot is pestering this very issue :)

Does the bot have access to the issue text? If so, we might add a feature that allows a user to comment something like:

blockedon #162 

to inform the stale bot that it should leave the issue alone until #162 is resolved.

from stale.

This seems like a great summary of our conversation! Thanks for putting this down @anglinb 😄 💯

So yeah - the take-away point is that issues can become "stale" for many different reasons; and there's more to a stale issue than always warrants unilateral closing. I believe the first-pass of stale-bot interacting with an issue should be prompting both the user and the maintainers for any more action - even if the user has still filled out a perfect issue report, they may be no longer experiencing the issue or could provide new output to further diagnose the issue; alternatively maintainers may not have gotten round to responding properly yet and just need nudging. I understand the message is configurable so it's just down to the team - but I agree with the solution of making this more opinionated or at least offering guidance of writing a friendly+helpful first-response could help.

Also - I think the simple action of a bot automatically closing the issue could be deemed user hostile. Perhaps rather than the bot closing the issue, it could be configurable that the bot only comments on stale issues, and leaves it to the maintainers to decide if it should be closed? Having a message every N days saying "hey, this issue has gone [another] N days without any activity, someone should do something" could be a great way to prompt either the user or maintainer to use human-intuition to drive the issue to close/resolved. I believe (though would be happily corrected) that currently the path is stale->closed or stale->updated->stale->closed - having a loop of stale->reminder->reminder->reminder->... may be beneficial.

Another thing is; I believe that in some ways stale draws negative connotations. I wonder if there is a better word to use to describe this behaviour? maybe needs-attention over stale?

from stale.

After reading some of the reactions we got we updated the stale comment to be more descriptive /cc: atom/atom#15775.

Here are some examples of reactions to the bot. I can add more as I find them.

atom/atom#1495 (comment)
atom/atom#11733 / atom/atom#12677
atom/atom#5998

from stale.

This looks to just be waiting for #162 to be reviewed and merged.

from stale.

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

from stale.

This looks to just be waiting for #162 to be reviewed and merged.

from stale.

I’d love stale bot to become more nuanced, thanks for putting such a great issue together to get the discussion going.

I wouldn’t mind an option to let humans close the issue, but I think it’s still okay for bots to make that by default. In most cases it is just being honest. Maintainers would love to help out more but they simply can’t. Even if the issues are relevant and pull requests are good, if they don’t get merged or reviewed after a certain time, it’s just being honest to close them, because it won’t happen any time soon.

But we can make the explanations more helpful. It would also be a great opportunity to give maintainers some guidance on what options they have, how people tend to react, what pitfalls to avoid, etc.

from stale.

Oh, the irony... Yes, it's still relevant. Merging #76 would be a good way to make some progress, unless there are objections.

from stale.

Is this still relevant? If so, please comment with any updates or addition details.

from stale.

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

from stale.

If the default message were changed to what stale-bot just used above:

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

...rather than the current default:

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.

...I'd consider this issue sufficiently addressed. Would a PR making that change be accepted, @bkeepers?

from stale.

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

from stale.

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?

from stale.