probot should lock old issues

[boneskull]

Inactive, closed issues should be automatically marked as "locked"; we would prefer new issues are created instead.

Henry Zhu's blog has a post about this.

I'd like the following settings, but this is open to debate:

daysUntilLock: 60
lockComment: false
only: issues
lockLabel: stale

cc @mochajs/core

[Munter]

+1

[plroebuck]

Two months seems a frightfully short period given how long it takes things to "complete" here. I tend to use closed issues in a more StackOverflow-style myself, noting some additional piece of the puzzle maybe related but maybe unworthy of YA issue. Having to look through multiple issues on exact same topic trying to find that one thing I read earlier is exhausting.

[boneskull]

@plroebuck It's a tradeoff. I assume you've read the blog post and understand why this would be helpful for maintainers?

60 days seems a reasonable amount of time--to me--to go between when an issue is closed with a PR fix and when that fix is released. I would increase this to 90 in the case that someone finds a problem with the fix well after the release (in which case, commenting on the PR might be a better idea anyway). Does that sound better?

Also... I don't understand this:

Two months seems a frightfully short period given how long it takes things to "complete" here.

We're talking about closed issues; we won't be automatically locking any open ones... until after they are closed for being stale, of course.

[Bamieh]

+1

Notifications on closed issues, as dan mentioned, are usually not useful. Users can always open new ones if they feel the locked/closed issues needs fresh attention. I'd even argue with pushing it back to 45 days! But 60 sounds fair as well.

In an ideal scenario, we'd have the bot comment something among these lines when locking the issue

If you feel that this issue still needs attention, please open a new Issue.

[outsideris]

Totally agreed. 60 days is good for me.

To clear, when there is an issue which is inactive, the probot label it as stale after 120 days and then close and lock it after 14 more days. right?

[Bamieh]

@outsideris closed issues are locked after 60 days so no one can comment on them or react to existing comments.

[outsideris]

You're right for a case of closed issues.
But for opened and inactive issue, probot close and lock the issue same time, I guess.

[boneskull]

@Bamieh The issue with the comment as suggested:

If you feel that this issue still needs attention, please open a new Issue.

is that maintainers will receive a notification for the comment..

[Bamieh]

@boneskull hahaha, then the bot would be causing the same issue it was created to solve.

[boneskull]

@Bamieh 😉 exactly, but it'd be even worse, because it'd happen on every issue!

[outsideris]

If we still agree with this, I will try to integrate the probot to lock closed comments. I feel that maintainers are suffering from comments on closed issues.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

We ended up going against this in #5029.