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Do you think stale issues or those for bugs which are unlikely to be fixed should be closed? Why / why not?

Stalebot in particular annoys me. “This issue hasn’t been worked on in X days so we’re gonna assume it’s no longer an issue. Please go to the effort of filing a new issue if you wanna, but honestly we’ll probably ignore that too.” It’s just riles me up!

5/10/25, 12:04 pm0 reposts0 likes

Barry Pollard

@tunetheweb.com

5 Oct 2025

Saying that I can see the value in triaging issues and flagging them as “unlikely to be worked on”. That’s honest to the reporter, gives them a change to provide more evidence why that might be the wrong call, and allows maintainers to see the wood for the trees.

Barry Pollard

@tunetheweb.com

5 Oct 2025

But it does risk the same issue being raised again, makes it more difficult to upvote or reference, and means others won’t fix even if you can’t (though honestly that’s unrealistic). So I’d prefer to be left open but flagged as “unlikely to fix”. I like Chrome DevTools new “icebox label” for this.