I'm usually the first to jump in to fight entitlement in open source, but stale bot is, as used, a terrible experience for even the most conscientious would-be contributor. I can't count the number of times that I've been digging around for a solution to a problem and found a GitHub issue that was closed by stale bot with no reply whatsoever.
Leaving the issue open until someone has a chance to actually look at it isn't extra manual work, its common courtesy from a project that is soliciting feedback. If you're not interested in feedback, don't let people waste their time creating issues in the first place.
If stale bot would by default only close an issue if the last reply was from a maintainer, that would be a different matter.
> don't let people waste their time creating issues in the first place
But then you don't get to use issues to track things that you personally care about. It would be nice if there were a way to enable issue creation by the repo owner / maintainers, but disallow it for the public at large. Especially now that "discussions" are a thing, which gives a place for people to comment without implicitly requesting work from the maintainer.
Apparently this is sort of possible[1] by setting `blank_issues_enabled: false`, so that you can only create issues from the Project page.
Leaving the issue open until someone has a chance to actually look at it isn't extra manual work, its common courtesy from a project that is soliciting feedback. If you're not interested in feedback, don't let people waste their time creating issues in the first place.
If stale bot would by default only close an issue if the last reply was from a maintainer, that would be a different matter.