probot VS stale

Since smee.io was designed to work with Probot for enabling development of GitHub applications it works very well with GitHub webhooks and its UI is somewhat tailored for use with GitHub (parsing GitHub specific headers); however, if you want to leverage smee.io for other services that use webhooks you may hit a few snags.

A GitHub App built with Probot that This app alerts you of good first issues.

I'd recommend using Probot: https://github.com/probot/probot

You can create GitHub Apps in different programming languages and register them under your personal account or organization. I'm going to show you how to build a GitHub App in under 5 minutes, using the Probot app framework. Probot is a framework for building GitHub Apps in Node.js. It aims to eliminate all the drudgery–like receiving and validating webhooks, and doing authentication handstands–so you can focus on the features you want to build.

The easiest marketplace solution available for GitHub bots is Probot. We already discussed some great GitHub bots for every open-source project in the last article. Now, it's time to move a step forward and learn how to install, enable and customize these GitHub bots with an easy example.

Probot is a Node.js framework used to create GitHub Apps. Probot monitors webhook events in a repository or organization, such as commenting on a pull request, creating a new issue, submitting a pull request, reviewing code, and so on.

Are you talking about merging the branches automatically on GitHub not locally? if that what are you talking about,then probot could help you, https://probot.github.io/ maybe you can find something in the marketplace that fit your request.

Today while I was looking at a list of open pull requests I still had open on Github, I was surprised to see a pull request that had been opened 2 years ago that I did not recall authoring, so I clicked on the PR. Turns out, I did in fact write the pull request, and it went 2 years without so much as a comment, let alone a review from the project maintainers.

Stale Bot helps in closing down stale issues and pull requests that have been open for a long time and have seen no particular action, hence, cutting down on the accumulation of issues and pull requests on the project.

> Thesis: Stalebot -- in dutiful service of current human resource constraints -- feels like it unthinkingly prioritizes discard of past contributors' time resources, over the mobilization of new human resources.

https://github.com/probot/stale/pull/107#issuecomment-379021...

I've had a beef with Stale since early on. It's a very old-world view of solving the problem of open source capacity. A better tool would instead try to find and encourage new resources (new contributors), whereas stalebot drives them away, and so kinda cuts the project off at the knees

It save cognitive and emotional resources of current contributors (in the short-term view), but driving future contributors away (in the long-term).