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

👋 Wanted to memorialize a conversation that @gr2m @bkeepers @JasonEtco and I had with @keithamus at GitHub Universe this past week. Keith brought up a really valid point about first time contributors and the way a bot closing out their issue might affect future contributions to open source. Everyone mentioned above, please feel free to edit my explanation as you see fit.

Apologies for my paraphrasing: There are two types of issues that end up getting closed. There are issues where the submitter has done their best to reproduce and for one reason or another the issue doesn’t get attention. The type is when the submitter is not responding or might not be following instructions. This type makes perfect sense for stale. It will close out issues that don’t meet the bar for human interaction.

However, the first type of issues where the submitter has done everything in their power to help describe the issue, there might be an opportunity to change the tone or interaction so that we could help empower new comers rather than have them get shut out by a bot.

Examples

I tried to pull up a few issues to try and describe these different circumstances.

Here is a situation where a person opened an issue without filling out the proper documentation: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/15889 This is a perfect candidate for stale or another bot to reply as rsese did in this instance.

Here is a situation when the original opener of the issue styurin got an answer from a member of the project and never replied. In this case it seems that it’s reasonable to close the issue b/c the original submitter never followed up: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/12964

Here is a situation when the user took time to report an issue and someone added a label but there was no further interaction. I would imagine the issue got fixed at some point b/c the original submitter, misaghshakeri, never replied. https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/12548 However, I wonder if some sort of interaction or nuance could help provide context.

Possible Solutions

We could use the first-timer property returned from the GraphQL endpoint to change the behavior of the app.

We could build a heuristic for how new a person is to GitHub to provide a nuanced response to stale.

We could be more opinionated/prescriptive on how we ask users to write their stale comment text.

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In short, I think stale is awesome. It’s adoption and resulting data gives us a really cool opportunity to re-asses its interactions and further investigate the tone, context, and persona of stale that will best serve the needs of first time contributors up through maintainers.

[waldyrious]

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

[stale[bot]]

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