I am not sure this is a problem everyone has, but I grew tired of people commenting on old, resolved GitHub issues. Almost every time someone would comment “I have this problem, too” it would actually be a different issue. Then I’d go through the routine of asking them to open a new issue with details about their specific problem. Sometimes they would, and sometimes they’d never come back.

Fortunately, right around the time I decided I should do something about this annoyance, GitHub released an API to lock issues. (Locking issues or pull requests prevents any new comments except from repo collaborators.)

So I put together a little gem called github-auto-locker to fetch and lock old, closed issues.

To install it (requires Ruby):

gem install github-auto-locker

Then run:

github-auto-locker USER REPO TOKEN [age in days]

For example, I run this to lock resolved issues over 60 days old:

github-auto-locker presidentbeef brakeman N0TM1R34L70K3N 60

The default is 120 days.

I’ve been running it periodically myself since February without any complaints. Perhaps it will be useful to you!