Request for reopening of automatically closed issues

[Qronikarz]

I'd like to request a reopen of ALL of my issues that were closed automatically. None of them were resolved in this time.

Also if I may add my opinion, autoclosing issues because of time passed is unwise. But if you really wanted it you should at least made the bot tag those issues with "stale-closed" so you can quickly review issues that got closed this way. I had few issues that I was looking at and only reacted in them with the "like" reaction so now I don't have a way to find them in this chaos.

#3677
#3671
#3309
#2972
#2866
#2865
#2703
#2696
#2674
#2671
#2663
#2638
#2637
#2508
#2277
#2047
#1201

[SuperSamus]

Also mine:
#2843
#2755
#2578

And... probably most of the closed issues that have been recently updated.

[TheEvilSkeleton]

Also if I may add my opinion, autoclosing issues because of time passed is unwise.

While I do agree, do keep in mind that none of us are issue triagers. Just seeing a large amount of opened issues makes me anxious, no matter the label/tag. The more I look at the issue tracker, the more it overwhelms me; and the more it overwhelms me, the less I'm willing to go through the issue tracker. I used to have notifications turned on for Bottles, but I eventually disabled them because I was getting too many emails and notifications in my inbox.

Autoclosing these issues made it much easier for me to read through a couple of them and comment. Again, I completely agree that autoclosing issues is extremely annoying, especially for those opening issues, but keeping them open makes it really difficult for people like myself to interact.

[Qronikarz]

Just seeing a large amount of opened issues makes me anxious, no matter the label/tag. The more I look at the issue tracker, the more it overwhelms me

Then I suppose there's nothing that can be done when it comes to helping with that. Bottles is an extremely complicated project (you for sure know that). I think even 300-400 open issues is to be expected and not a bad thing. Tagging them appropriately should make them easier to manage.

Autoclosing these issues made it much easier for me to read through a couple of them and comment

I'm not really completely against autoclosing, but it needs to be done wisely. This wasn't it. Still better than LineageOS bug tracker, but that's not a high level to beat. (tl;dr whenever a new version of LOS drops they close ALL issues and tell the users to report it again if they encounter it in new version).

2 immediate recommendations for now:

1. Have an autoclosing bot, but tag all those issues that got closed with "autoclosed-stale".
2. Follow up what has been said with this autobot - people commented with reopening the issues and they are still closed - for example the Unity games issue.

I also think extending the labels that are currently in use would make it more manageable. We have bug, feedback, feature request and others. One of the best label usages on GitHub that I can think of is TagStudio. There are tags for:

• Status of the issue (help wanted, review needed, blocked)
• Type of the issue (refactor, suggestion, translation, test, duplicate, bug, wontfix, question)
• Priority (low, medium, high)

With this, while the total number of issues stays the same, you can just default to one label and be less overwhelmed.

keeping them open makes it really difficult for people like myself to interact.

Right now, people make duplicate issues even when they search for it before. Because now they see it as a closed issue so they make another one since it was not fixed/added yet. This is one of such cases - #4001 The lack of backup progress.

Another thing that doesn't help with Bottles is that it has a really, really outdated documentation. I planned to update it back when the forums were still a thing, but back then Bottles was releasing with often breaking changes so fast that you would need to constantly do it. And now that the rewrite was announced the documentation will be outdated yet again. And speaking of forums. When they closed and redirected to GitHub discussions, I hoped that the developers would reply more often since for quite some time I was the only one that answered the topics that users made. It's not really the case right now, many of them are without a single reply and if they are answered they are not closed. There's only 7 of them closed and weirdly my own one shouldn't actually gotten closed because it turned out later that it is indeed an issue (#3729). I am not really well versed enough in Bottles to know how it is built and how it works so I can not answer most of the discussions here. There are some questions that only the developers can answer (I still don't know what is the expected behavior of bottle.yml)

So, tl;dr the situation is not ideal, but in the current state it will get worse if some things are left as they are.

If you want I could go through few of the issues (even the closed ones) and give my recommendation on how to tag them. I'll then post it in new topic on GitHub discussion and you could review them and tag them, but I would first need new tags since the current ones are lacking.

[SuperSamus]

A better solution would have been that a bot says that the issue has had no activity for the last x time, and if there is no other activity, it will be closed in y time.
That way, if an issue wasn't solved, anyone could have commented to keep it open.

It's still a flawed system, but it's still an improvement over immediately closing everything with no warning and communication.

(Also, don't put an automatic message that says to comment to get it reopened, if this is not followed through.)