I'm one of the open source React Native maintainers here at Facebook, and I'm the one who has set the direction for how issues are treated on our React Native repository.

To anyone whose issue I've closed prematurely, it's OK to feel upset about it. Please do let me know when that happens, as that is the signal I'm looking for. Out of thousands of issues that the bot has closed automatically, only a few dozen end up getting commented on after the fact. Some of these issues we won't reopen because there is no minimal repro (usually because they were opened before we started enforcing the issue template, in which case, please open a new issue!), but in many cases all it needs is for a maintainer to go in and re-open the issue.

If you're reading this and you are one of the people actively participating in the repo, and you'd like to get added to the team that manages issues, please reach out. We have a handful of non-Facebook maintainers with this type of access and we're always looking for more. Shoot an email to my first name @ fb.com.

At this time, we're only automatically closing issues that don't make use of the template. The requirements are actually quite lax: all we ask is for you to run `react-native info` so we can get more information about your setup, and a minimal reproducible example. Questions and requests for help do get sent to Stack Overflow, and this is with the community's best interest in mind as we want to focus on bugs and regressions that affect people's apps. For anything that is not a bug report or a request for help, we have an open-ended discussion template that can be used to file issues that used to get closed automatically in the past.

We used to close stale issues more aggressively in the past, which was needed to get us down from thousands of open issues down to a more manageable state. The bot now only closes issues after four months of inactivity. The bot does give a 30 day warning which should be enough for people to verify if the bug is still present in the latest release, in which case they can leave a comment and the bot won't bug you for another 90 days. This way, we can prune out any issues that got fixed in a release - as others have commented, sometimes the people fixing a bug are not aware that an issue was filed for the bug for various reasons.

But the true purpose of the stale bot is transparency: if there has been no activity in the issue in such a long time, it's not something people should expect to see fixed soon. Typically, issues where someone is able and willing to provide a fix for, or long-running issues describing a problem that does not have an easy fix but the core team wishes to fix at some point, will have some sort of ongoing discussion, in which case we protect the issue from being closed by adding the appropriate label ("Core Team" or "For Discussion").

Finally, I want to point out that the project is open source. If you are waiting for a fix to be merged and need to unblock yourself right now, you can always cut a release off your own fork. Please let us know when you do this, as this helps provide us with some signal about PRs that could be prioritized.

PS: If you would like to learn more about how we prepare each release, please visit https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-relea...