Turn off the Stale Issues Bot

[seancolsen]

Current behavior

• We have a GitHub action that marks issues as stale after no activity within 90 days. Mostly we seem to be removing the stale label whenever the bot applies it.

  Example

• I get notified each time the bot applies the label and each time someone from our team removes it. I find these notifications to be a minor nuisance.

Desired behavior

• No more auto-applied "stale" labels

Additional context

• In a semi-private channel, I proposed to @kgodey that we disable this action, and she agreed. She said:

  I'm fine with disabling the stale bot, when I set it up in the beginning of the project, it was useful (generally we were moving so quickly and our goals were changing enough that issues we hadn't touched in 90 days could generally be closed immediately, it was a good reminder to do so). Now it seems like we're just removing the stale label when it pops up, and that's not useful

@rajatvijay I've assigned this to you since it seems to fall within your "Repo admin" responsibility. Please delegate or ask for help if you're unable to do this on your own.

[kgodey]

Now it seems like we're just removing the stale label when it pops up, and that's not useful

Please note that we could also change this behavior if we do find the stale notifications to be useful. I noticed that @dmos62 commented on a bunch of stale issues recently and advocated for closing them (or just closed them), and this means our backlog is a little cleaner. If we reviewed stale issues as they came up and made decisions about closing them, it would help with keeping our backlog cleaner over time without having to do huge "look at every issue at once" cleanup projects. That was the original intent of the stale bot.

I'll leave the decision about how to proceed up to @rajatvijay or whoever will be doing repo admin for the next cycle.

[dmos62]

When I looked at old issues, I just sorted them in reverse chronological order. But, I do think that a stale bot could be useful, it's just that the 90 day staleness definition might be too strict. Maybe let's do 120 or 150 days? If you go back a certain amount of time, 80% of issues that are still open are not useful anymore. I think we definitely can use stale bot for weeding those out proactively.

[pavish]

I talked to @rajatvijay and @seancolsen, and I'll be picking this up.

[seancolsen]

I'll take this up now that I'm in charge of repo admin