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Tighten stale issue and PR thresholds#54043

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MichaelSimons merged 2 commits intomainfrom
tighten-stale-thresholds
Apr 22, 2026
Merged

Tighten stale issue and PR thresholds#54043
MichaelSimons merged 2 commits intomainfrom
tighten-stale-thresholds

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@MichaelSimons
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@MichaelSimons MichaelSimons commented Apr 22, 2026

Summary

Reduce the stale thresholds as a first step toward more aggressive cleanup of inactive issues and PRs.

Changes

Threshold Before After
Issues stale after 5 years (1827 days) 4.5 years (1644 days)
Days before stale issue closed 30 days 14 days
PRs stale after 6 months (180 days) 4 months (120 days)
Days before stale PR closed 7 days 7 days (unchanged)

Plan

This is the first step in a gradual tightening. In approximately one month, we plan to ratchet these down further to 4 years for issues and 2 months for PRs.

Related to #54044.

Reduce the stale thresholds as a first step toward more aggressive cleanup:
- Issues: 5 years → 4.5 years (1827 → 1644 days)
- PRs: 6 months → 4 months (180 → 120 days)
- Days before stale issue is closed: 30 → 14 days

Plan to ratchet down further in ~1 month to 4 years and 2 months
respectively.

Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
Copilot AI review requested due to automatic review settings April 22, 2026 15:31
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Pull request overview

Adjusts the GitHub Actions stale workflow thresholds to label/close inactive issues and PRs sooner as part of a broader cleanup effort.

Changes:

  • Reduce days-before-issue-stale from ~5 years to ~4.5 years.
  • Reduce days-before-issue-close from 30 days to 14 days (and update the stale issue message accordingly).
  • Reduce days-before-pr-stale from 6 months to ~4 months.

@lbussell
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Issues stale after 4.5 years
PRs stale after 4 months (120 days)

It seems to me like you are choosing to slowly decrease the staleness window so that we don't blanket mark a ton of PRs/issues as stale all at once. That makes sense to me, but what is the end-goal for the issue/PR staleness windows? Or are we targeting a specific number of stale/non-stale issues and PRs? And is there a specific issue tracking the ratchet down of the values and the timeline?

@MichaelSimons
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Issues stale after 4.5 years
PRs stale after 4 months (120 days)

It seems to me like you are choosing to slowly decrease the staleness window so that we don't blanket mark a ton of PRs/issues as stale all at once. That makes sense to me, but what is the end-goal for the issue/PR staleness windows? Or are we targeting a specific number of stale/non-stale issues and PRs? And is there a specific issue tracking the ratchet down of the values and the timeline?

The plan is in the PR description:

Plan

This is the first step in a gradual tightening. In approximately one month, we plan to ratchet these down further to 4 years for issues and 2 months for PRs.

I will log an issue to track this.

@MichaelSimons
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I will log an issue to track this.

#54044

@MichaelSimons
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Merging ahead of PR validation since it doesn't cover the action.

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3 participants