This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-many-people-are-paid-to-work-on-nix-nixpkgs/8307/85

I have nothing against making long text shorter where possible, or improving formatting, but this PR currently also makes some changes I consider regressions:

• It removes some actionable advice (what to do when a maintainer approved your change, how to use git blame to find somebody relevant). That info seems very useful for newcomers; the new text appears to assume that you know all of that already.

• It changes the criterion of when to close issues, from a

  checking if the issue is still valid. If it isn't, please close it.

  clear determination that the issue is invalid, to If this might still be an issue, but you [one of many people pinged by the bot] don't have a vested interest in promoting it's resolution, please consider closing it while encouraging others to take over and reopen an issue if they care enough.

  First, this weakens the condition on closure; with this new text, it suggests that any of the pinged people can determine that they themselves don't have a vested interest promoting the resolution, and thus close it. This is bad, because if the issue is, "XYZ is isn't working", then the issue should not be closed when somebody loses interest in making it work, but only when XYZ is working again, or if software XYZ became obsolete.

  Second, it encourages a new mode of "well just close the issue for now even though it's still an issue, and suggests others can reopen it if they feel like it". This is a strong change from what the bot suggested so far.

Renderd PR

Hello!

Thank you in the name of the community for your contributions.

Very unfortunately sometimes PRs get left behind for too long.

• There was no activity on this PR for 180 days.
• So I marked it as 2:status: stale.
• I'll never close any Pull Request. Promised.

→ STALE-BOT-HELP

Rendered Issue

Hello!

Thank you in the name of the community for opening this issue.

Very unfortunately sometimes issues get left behind for too long.

• There was no activity on this issue for 180 days.
• So I marked it as 2:status: stale.
• I'll never close any issue. Promised.

→ STALE-BOT-HELP

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-ready-for-review/3032/337

The current text is an imposition on the reader, reformulate to make it short, concise and useful.

Doesn't this PR make the message left on issues longer? According to the diff it replaces ~164 words by ~313. In the interest of brevity it's probably best to leave out lines like "So it is my most undesired pleasure to be explicit about it:". Or advice like "5. As in all open source projects, though, by far your best option is to submit a Pull Request that addresses this issue" which is true but not super useful, since if the submitter had the ability to fix the issue, they probably would have done so already.

I'm not sure a "never-stale" label is a good idea. It just means that eventually we're going to need a bot to clean up the never-stale issues...

Another possibility is to put that information somewhere else (e.g. in the manual) and link to it from the comment. That way we don't have to duplicate a large body of text (which could get outdated) across hundreds of issues.

Regarding "never-stale": yeah, it sounds fine if only maintainers can add that label.

I think we should move it into the manual as edolstra suggests. Then the bot message can be much more minimal.

The only time you need to find it is when the bot mentions it, and there will be a link to it. I'd also be fine with putting it in a file like nixpkgs/.github/stale.md, then it would live next to the stale configuration.

I think it is a waste to put effort into this rewording when we are so close to having a place where a longer form message is okay.

.github/STALE-BOT-HELP.md was an excellent idea! Thank you @ryantm Done.

This has become really good now.

Squashed & Rebased. Merge?

Is something still holding this back?

@blaggacao Please review #101320 I made the stale bot message even shorter, renamed the markdown file and edited your text.

#101320 ❤️