Closed issue threads, even very old ones, have a great deal of utility to project communities. They are a common place for users to share workarounds, caveats, and link to related issues.
Instead of simply locking a thread, if we could:
- automatically unsubscribe maintainers
(and comment "tag
{maintainer}if and only if this is still an issue") - comment and label the issue accordingly
- have a user-level bot for opt-in "soft-lock" notification unsubscriptions.
In the real world, superset
manages without locks and has a .pinned tag to prevent automatic closure.
The flutter maintainers somehow go without any close bot at all.
Speaking personally, there is probably no OS-related experience more frustrating than finding an X-years old issue for my exact problem that was automatically closed and locked by bots. We need a more nuanced solution to the problem of maintainer notification overload.
Locked threads are much more than a "minor inconvenience" to users. Commenting "still broken on v2" on a closed issue is a much lower activation cost than a new issue, And it makes the issue more glanceable because context can be consolidated.
As a maintainer myself, I empathize with how valuable the notification noise reduction is. But, the result here is that if a user has something to contribute that isn't worth a new issue, that contribution is not made, or else the maintainers get even more noise because that user has to open a new issue or w/e (where the other community members who had the same issue are no longer in-thread to help).
One of the major reasons I stopped using react native was because (at the time)
so many issues were auto stale => locked.
Let's take as an example, this issue that is nothing but users troubleshooting. The current possible states of the underlying issue are:
- It was resolved with no other issue created. That knowledge will likely never be recorded.
- A new issue was created and resolved. If that issue was then
locked, the knowledge that they are related will likely never be recorded (beyond implicitly by the right keyword search) - It was never resolved. Eventually a new user encounters the same issue and opens it anew, possibly linking it. All the old context is lost until possibly excavated.