issuewhiz

I handle this by redirecting all questions (anything that isn't a feature request or a bug report) to the project's community forum (hosted on discourse). Then I wrote and deployed https://github.com/pierotofy/issuewhiz to automatically catch and close issues that are identified as questions. GitHub issues is not the place to ask questions, in my opinion. Here's an example of it in action: https://github.com/LibreTranslate/LibreTranslate/issues/632 It's been working pretty well.

A few guidelines to avoid maintainer's burnout: * Do not allow questions on GitHub issues, it's a poor place for conversations. I find Discourse or some other forum (or mailing list) a better place to do that, which allows community participation (and you can automate moderation using something like https://github.com/pierotofy/issuewhiz) * People owe you nothing, just as you owe them nothing; you don't have to fix an issue or merge a pull request because somebody opened one. * Try review and merge contributions, but on your own timeframe. If people have urgency, kindly invite them to get a paid support agreement. * Don't engage in quarrels; you always have the option to ignore or ban the offenders. * Document FAQs.

I built a GitHub action that automates the triaging of issues. In a nutshell, you can define boolean questions using natural language, such as: A: Does this text look like a software bug report? B: Is this about a frontend problem? C: Is this about a backend problem? And define rules to act on such questions: if A and B --> Add label bug frontend if A and C --> Add label bug backend if A --> Add label bug else --> Add comment Thanks for opening an issue! We will triage this shortly. It uses LLMs to answer the questions, but also supports conventional regex style logic. Would love to hear feedback or suggestions for improvements.