Adding a Stale Workflow

[dooleydevin]

Hi everyone!

Over the years this repository has accumulated nearly 500 open pull requests, some of which date back close to a decade. To give every contribution the attention it deserves, and to set clear expectations, we’ve enabled a “stale” workflow that will help us chip away at the backlog in a fair and predictable way.

How the new workflow works

• Batches, oldest first: The stale workflow will review small batches of PRs in order of least recently updated.
• Gentle reminders: If a PR has no activity for 90 days, the bot will add a stale label and leave a comment letting you know that it is marked stale.
• 180-day grace period: A PR will be closed only after 180 consecutive days of inactivity (starting from the addition of the stale label).
• Un-stale with activity: Any comment by the author or another contributor will remove the stale label and reset the clock.

What this means for you

• Waiting on a review? Leave a quick comment on your PR to make sure it does not get marked stale.
• Need to update your branch? A small rebase or force-push also counts as activity and prevents auto-closure.
• Closed by the bot unintentionally? Just re-open or create a fresh PR with the same changes.

Our commitment

The goal of this workflow is not to close PRs -- it’s to surface them sustainably so we can review, merge, or give clear feedback instead of letting them sit in limbo forever. Right now we lack insight into which PRs the community needs reviewed, and frankly, we feel a little overwhelmed by the backlog. We hope this will help dedicated contributors as much as it helps us, by bringing the PRs everyone cares about most to our attention.

Thank you for helping us keep gitignore useful for everyone 😄

— @github/gitignore-maintainers