Help close your old issues on the Webmin and Virtualmin github?

General Discussion
1

Howdy all,

If you’ve ever opened an issue on the Webmin or Virtualmin github issue trackers and your issue was resolved, either directly or by an update that happened to fix the problem, can you go close that issue?

There’s hundreds, going back many years. I’ve spent many hours closing a couple hundred over the past couple days, but I’m tired and hundreds remain. Lots of the issues are fly-bys, opened by one person who we never saw again and one of us will have to deal with those, but some are from longtime users, as well, some of whom are active here, too.

Of course, if you opened an issue that hasn’t been resolved, don’t close it! And, maybe follow up, so I don’t close it! We want to fix every bug or misfeature, if we can. But, for anything that hasn’t had a follow up in a couple of years or more, I’m closing it and hoping it’s been fixed by an update, rather than spending a bunch of tie trying to track down the user for an update or try to reproduce the issue. (I am often doing a search to see if we’ve had commits that look related if it looks like a real bug, so some issues take longer than others to close.)

You can only close your own issues, so if you’ve never opened an issue, this isn’t for you. But, if you have, and if it got solved and you didn’t close it, please do so!

Thanks!

2

@Joe all mine require Virtualmin/Webmin team intervention, but just in-case, I will go over them and re-check as you are right some times they are fixed but are not closed.

3

I am pretty sure this is not me. (I rarely use Git these days and have never kept up with its expansion) I do not remember any, but if there were any feel free to close them.

4

Can you give us a URL… I went over to the GITHUB Virtualmin page, but couldn’t find any issues of mine…

5

Feel free to get in touch. I do courses how to use Google ($50/h).

7

Not sure what you’re talking about… I run a business teaching people “how to internet”. Google (resp. search engines) is a course too.

9

i guess everyone start out as basic then hopefully gets better and eventually gets proficient then gradually declines/forgets/or worse

11

Ok, sounds good, much appreciated!

12

Thanks!

Yep, if it’s an ongoing issue, leave it open, and we’ll try to get to it.

13

Thank you, Joe!

I’ve fully automated it now. Today, May 21, 2026 at 12:00 UTC, the first run will close all stale issues and PRs in all our repos that are older than 3 months.

After that, all issues older than 21 days will get a “Stale” label and an automatic bump comment. They’ll be closed after another 7 days if there’s no follow-up.

@Jamie, @Joe, @Eric—Hold on tight, you’re about to get a lot of emails in your inbox.

And, anyone who wants to clear their inbox of such automated emails can search/filter for automatically because there has been no follow-up for 3 months and delete them.

14

Do you know the amount of time I spent making these bug reports and feature requests just to have then killed off.

Most of them were pending because they needed the Virtuamin staff.

I have just cancelled my Pro subscription and I will not be doing any more bug reporting or feature requests.

Thanks

15

That’s overkill, Ilia. I wish you’d discussed that first! There’s a reason I was manually closing issues, only after reading them.

16

it could be said there should be a flag(s) “won’t fix” or “out of scope” which you could take the flags in this instance could retain git issues that don’t fall into those catagories. I would also think after 3 months if there has been no input there is a big chance that the issue/feature request will not be taken on board. That said when you leave the git issues page open & the cat walks over the keyboard that is a different matter

17

I’ve asked Ilia to undo this. We don’t automatically close issues. I’ve been reading them and closing them when they’re clearly stale or when I know we’ve done work in a related area (or I’m actually fixing the bug and closing it that way).

18

I beg your pardon, we address 90% of your issues within days. A few percent of your issues are not immediately addressed. Most of those that are not, are almost never older than 3 months.

It’s frustrating to hear such reactions! I find it offensive!

@shoulders Which specific issues, and how many of them, did I close today during the cleanup that are still not resolved?

Which ones are still pending exactly?

We appreciate this! And you know how fast and responsive we’ve always been.

Also, it’s not a problem to comment on the issue and have it reopened. Nobody deleted or removed anything.

If an author spends hours or days reporting it, it only takes a few minutes to say, “Hold on, it’s not fixed, please reopen it”.

Sorry, I didn’t expect that reaction and didn’t think it was a big deal. I checked most repos before working on the solution. Many had issues and old PRs—most a few years old, some even older. There’s not much value in “bug” reports that have been inactive for years.

I don’t think there’s a way to undo this.

Each author of the issue was emailed. They can comment on the issue tracker. When that happens, we reopen it with a follow-up question. One person already did, and I’ve reopened that ticket.

I don’t really understand the strong reaction to something like that.

Still, I apologize if anyone felt hurt. That was never my intention, and everyone knows the intentions were good.

In fact, too many stale issues cause their own problems. When real bugs sit unresolved, the software stays broken. Notifying the issue author should prompt a clear response if it’s still a problem.

Once they reply, we’ll reopen it and fix the bug much faster than if it just sat there further for years. In fact, I’ll likely to handle the fix within 24 hours. It’s a win-win.

19

And also, any newcomer to the project repo who sees over 300 unresolved issues from years ago will get a bad impression and think it reflects poorly on the project. That should be considered too.

20

I got 170+ emails, so maybe 85 issues, but too many for me to go through and check over. Some from Virtualmin and some from Webmin. I reported in both repos.

I have kept the emails in a separate folder but I am genuinely a bit upset about this, not because they were closed or not accepted, but because it was done blindly. I makes me feel that it was all wasted time spent.

Some issues raised do get looked and then fixed very quickly, I will not deny this, but if the issue is not looked at within a couple of days and it starts sinking down the list of GitHub issues, it might not get another lookin unless bumped.

I as person can only pester the developers so much before it would come across as annoying so I have to pick which issues to push etc…

A lot of these issues are to do with Virtualmin and Webmin as a web-hosting software but other projects for the platform have come along so I have not wanted to push my issues on the developers.

Closing all issues with no activity after 3 months is basically saying if I don’t pester the developers they will close the issue. So it seems no correct way of doing things. Pester the devs, they will get annoyed (eventually), don’t pester and the issue is auto closed.

anyway that is my 2C

I do understand that I post more issues that others, but I needed to because of the issues found and no-one else seemed to be reporting.

21

We need to find a way.

22

Sorry about the emails. You’ll probably get a bunch more when I re-open them all later today.

23

It was done automatically by a bot, not directly by me. However, after discussing it with @Jamie and @Joe, I admit now that I made a poor decision on a period, as three-month is far too short. It should be at least a year to fit about four releases based on our average cadence.

@shoulders, and, to be clear, you’re the only issue reporter out there who creates so many issues! Like, literally the only one!

And here is why it became a problem…

…overall, my thinking was that we do need to close as many dead issues as possible, do it automatically, and avoid closing legitimate ones. And, if false positive, I’d expect that someone receiving an email about their issue being closed by a bot, and the issue is still a problem for them, they would go back and remind the us about it. In fact, someone already did that, and I re-opened some of them.

And, to be clear, your case is exceptional. I should have remembered that you created so many issues reports, and excluded you from the automation.

@Joe, no, it’s not your job to fix my mistakes. I’ll handle it myself.

I’ll review all issues closed today that were created more than two years ago, covering about eight releases based on our average cadence, which should be more than enough to be valid, and leave a comment saying: “Since this issue was closed by a bot, please write a short comment if it’s still a problem for you with Webmin 2.641 or Virtualmin 8.1.0”, and we’ll gladly reopen it and address it.

And for @shoulders, I’ll simply make an exception and reopen all issues that were closed today by the bot.