The RStudio community is one of the biggest reasons why RStudio is such a strong IDE. Community adoption of preview versions of RStudio is tremendous, sometimes with 50% of our user base adopting preview versions before release. This provides incredible visibility and ensures a very broad review of new features, in every environment, which directly improves product quality.

Consequently, the volume of incoming issues (bugs and feature requests) is very high. It is in all our best interest that we resolve critical issues quickly and focus the team on improvements with the biggest impact. We simply can’t do everything, and we will serve you better if we focus on key goals rather than slowly make tiny improvements across the board.

To help this prioritization, we will be closing issues which won’t realistically be addressed in the next few releases (about a year or so). This will allow us to stay focused, and to deal expediently with new incoming critical issues. It will also provide the community with a much clearer view of our roadmap.

We are now using a bot that will auto-close issues in the backlog which have no activity for 90 days, and which haven’t been selected as part of our roadmap (i.e., assigned a milestone). We will regularly review and give priority to feature requests with the most up-votes from the community.

If you created or care about an issue that has been closed, please know that we appreciate your efforts to help improve the product, and we know that can be frustrating. We are simply trying to make the largest impact we can with a small development team. If you strongly feel that your issue deserves our attention, please confirm the issue is still present in the latest release of RStudio (https://dailies.rstudio.com/). You can comment in the issue, or open a new issue linking to the closed one. State your case why this should be addressed, and try to gain enough community upvotes for the issue. We will take another look. We are incredibly grateful for your feedback and for your efforts in helping improve the product.