2y ago

Someone has started answering to the github stalebot with memes

github.com

Image viewer jumps when zooming in and out · Issue #12630 · signalapp/Signal-Android

Normalize replying to the stalebot likewise

10 comments

The stalebot is most times useless. The only scenario where I can see use of it is a maintainer waiting for the reporter to add information. But closing issues because no maintainer checked on them? That's garbage and discourages bug reports.
- But they get scared because their program has 500 bugs! Close them and now your program only has 10 bugs! Problem solved.
  /s
  
  absolute galaxy brain moment
They shouldn’t even be using the probot, it’s deprecated, unmaintained and thus potentially vulnerable
- Also just the whole concept is wrong and encourages "me too" spam just to keep the thing from timing out and not being fixed.
  
  I actually see a legitimate use case for it and helped add the actions version in a project where I'm a collaborator.
  Quite a bit, certain bugs disappear after an update without us targeting it (partially because the logs get fudged a bit after going through dependencies, so sometimes multiple bugs have the same cause or it's actually a dependency issue that got fixed) and sometimes we forget about old feature requests.
  The stale reminder doubles as a reminder for us to (re)consider working on the issue. When we know something probably isn't gonna get fixed suddenly, we apply a label to the issue. For enhancements that we'll definitely work on soon™, we apply help wanted. We've configured the action to ignore both. We also patrol notifications from stale to see if something shouldn't go stale. This is a medium-sized project so we can handle patrolling and IMO this helps us quite a bit.
After a extremely long week, I sometimes participate in open source. I have to deal with malicious commits. I have to follow up on issues from misguided individuals who are actually looking for tech support. I have to guide new contributors to how this massive repo works and to submit tests. I have to negotiate with the core team and these convos can often last months/years.
And contributing to open-source is one of the few things that give me pleasure, even if it's a extremely thankless job.
But I'm tired man.
I'm not dealing with low-quality memers who are providing zero value. Nor should we encourage it.
- I do FOSS as well, but I'd rather people have fun punting the stalebot than just keep repeating "this issue still exists". I will probably get a chuckle out of it.
- I would argue that in this case the maintainers are in the wrong for not even responding to the issue, not the reporter responding with memes.

10 comments