Hi Alex, Thanks for starting this discussion.
>From my POV if the project closes stale issues automatically, it implies that we review issues within the grace period and begin working on relevant issues. However, I do not think this is happening in practice. If the issue was filed as a matter of confusion, it effectively becomes a kind of user question, which still deserves an answer from the community (even if the answer is "we do not know"). If the issue was filed correctly but the reporter is no longer engaged with the project, the issue still deserves fixing. If it is necessary to ask for feedback from the reporter and the reporter does not respond, then it would be reasonable to close the issue after a grace period. All in all, I tend to favour the option of not automatically closing issues, but reviewing old issues periodically (perhaps in the Community Sync call) and closing with a personal message. Cheers, Dmitri. On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 4:52 PM Alexandre Dutra <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi team, > > A recent PR [1] fixed a misconfiguration that had prevented the > automatic closing of stale issues from working in Polaris. While this > feature seems to have been intended from the start, its re-enablement > raises a fundamental question: should we be closing stale issues > automatically? > > Arguments for closing include: > > - It helps to clear out issues that are no longer being actively > worked on or are irrelevant. > > - The system provides a 14-day grace period before an issue is closed, > giving anyone the chance to comment and keep the issue open. > > Arguments against closing include: > > - An issue might still be valid even if the original reporter has > become inactive. Closing it could lead to losing track of important, > unresolved problems. > > What are your thoughts on this? > > Thanks, > Alex > > [1]: https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/3636 >
