GitHub stale bot considered harmful
In my experience, these auto-closing bots are the natural result of software development workflows that treat <i>issues</i> as <i>tasks to be closed</i>, rather than a <i>data point</i> that a user is experiencing a problem of some kind (maybe they are doing things wrong, expecting something the project doesn't provide, or triggering a real problem – the exact cause is immaterial).<p>This treatment of issue-as-a-task is made worse by corporate micromanagement frameworks like Agile, which encourage metrics on how many of these issues-as-tasks are closed, which leads to ill-advised features like this that close them automatically because "Duh, no one said anything in 30 days".<p>If I were to design this myself, I would argue that the correct way to treat an issue is <i>not</i> to have it have a closed or open state at all. If the issue spawns a task or related tasks, you can close <i>those</i>. Or you can provide feedback on the issue that states that it is invalid. The user has already experienced a problem or wants a feature, there is no value in putting a red label that indicates "I'm done with this, please go away". It unnecessarily invalidates the experience of users who have their provided valuable time to report something to your software project. I think this is similar to the approach used by forums like Discourse, where a thread about a problem will usually not be closed or locked, but will just age out of current discussion if nobody brings it up.