Issues should be kept active if reactions (ie upvotes) or backlinks

[nitrocode]

Previous issue #613 which ended with the issue closed by the stale-bot.

The problem

Stale bot is becoming a plague, closing important issues and harming the community. It encourages people to spam issues to keep them open. It ignores much of the issue metadata, like reactions and links to external repositories.

If an issue keeps getting upvoted or other repositories keep linking back to the issue, stalebot will not care unless there is a comment which leads to people adding unhelpful comments to the discussion to keep the issue open.

The solution

Eventually I think the issue bot would be nice if it was based on a scoring model. A good first step though would be to prevent closing an issue with a certain number of comments, upvotes (reactions on the root) or external links from other repositories to that issue. If these were filters that could be applied, I think it would accomplish its goal of lowering issues while keeping relative ones still active.

Maybe allowing people to override the bot via community feedback through the comments would also help. Something other than lets blindly close an issue that hasn't been commented on in the last 30 days.

The stalebot should reset the start-time from the last upvote or backlink on the issue.

[HonkingGoose]

The stalebot should reset the start-time from the last upvote or backlink on the issue.

I'd like this feature to be opt-in.

Clicking an emoji button to "upvote" an issue or backlinking to it does nothing meaningful to fix the issue. So for me, those actions should still keep the issue stale.

[matifali]

What about adding an exception if an issue has X upvotes/reactions do not stale?
This should be opt-in though.

[Reinmar]

We needed this feature for the main CKEditor 5 issue tracker. We rely reactions to track the popularity of issues and implicitly ask for them. This helps keeping the issue threads cleaner while still having some feedback from the community.

@gorzelinski implemented the option to count reactions as "activity" in his fork: gorzelinski#1 and we'll soon be testing it.

We'll create a PR in this repo soon :)

[arkflpc]

AFAIK, it is ready for review. CC: @dsame

[JosephTLyons]

Our entire Zed repo revolves around upvotes (👍) and a democratic process. It would be great if I could say "don't close any issues with more than 5 upvotes."