closing inactive issues

[sangyuxiaowu]

Description

There are too many issues, it is recommended to configure automatic closure of inactive issues.

https://docs.github.com/zh/actions/use-cases-and-examples/project-management/closing-inactive-issues

[martindevans]

I'm not personally a fan of auto closing issues - it can hide long standing unfixed issues and become very frustrating for people!

However, you're right we definitely need to cleanup some issues. Would you be interested in ging through (some or all) of the open issue, reviewing which ones are resolved? If you comment on ones which need closing I can follow up and close them.

When I've done that in the past myself it's usually been quite productive, exposing old issues that have been forgotten.

[sangyuxiaowu]

Hi, just a suggestion for improving issue management here:

I noticed that sometimes people open issues and then forget about them. It might be helpful to have a bot that sends a reminder after a few days of inactivity, and eventually closes the issue if there's still no response. This could encourage users to check if the issue is already resolved and close it themselves, or update the thread if there's new progress.

Also, as the project keeps evolving and new versions are released, many previously reported issues might already be fixed without the users realizing it. Automatically managing inactive issues can help reduce noise, keep the tracker clean, and save time for both users and maintainers.

Thanks for your consideration!

[martindevans]

A reminder bot seems like a good idea. As long as we could somehow tag issues to "protect" them from auto closing. Do you have any recommendations for setups like this?

[sangyuxiaowu]

I understand your concerns about auto-closing issues potentially hiding long-standing problems. However, I believe implementing a reminder bot could strike a good balance. This bot could send reminders after a certain period of inactivity and only close issues after multiple reminders with no response.

To address your concern about protecting certain issues from being auto-closed, we could use specific labels (e.g., do-not-close) that the bot would recognize and exclude from the auto-closing process.

[sangyuxiaowu]

like this ?

name: Close stale issues

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 * * *' 

jobs:
  stale:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/stale@v9
        with:
          repo-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          stale-issue-message: 'This issue has been automatically marked as stale due to inactivity. If no further activity occurs, it will be closed in 7 days.'
          stale-pr-message: 'This pull request has been automatically marked as stale due to inactivity. If no further activity occurs, it will be closed in 7 days.'
          days-before-stale: 60
          days-before-close: 7
          stale-issue-label: 'stale'
          exempt-issue-labels: 'do not close'
          operations-per-run: 30

[martindevans]

Looks good! Want to PR that?

[sangyuxiaowu]

I have submitted a PR with an initial GitHub Actions configuration to handle stale issues and pull requests. The configuration file is located at .github/workflows/stale_issues.yml
#1171

[martindevans]

The first run of this new action just happened, looks like it's working as intended. Thanks for working on this @sangyuxiaowu!