Bugzilla’s approach: in your “what error message?” comment, you also set the needsinfo?(reporter@example.com) flag (a single checkbox does it), and it can stay in that state indefinitely. This is then readily searchable, so that when you get round to doing another batch of manual triage you can quickly close it as incomplete, or try to follow it up, or whatever you like.

This also highlights another crucial difference in Bugzilla: it keeps track of not just open/closed state, but also the reason: fixed, can’t reproduce, won’t fix, incomplete… whereas stale bots are a single awful blunt instrument that seem like they might help with closing incomplete bug reports, but in practice they do much more closing of real stuff, annoying of reporters, shoving of stuff under the carpet, &c.

What the stale bots lack is nuance, because GitHub Issues is too generic to support a good triage bot that isn’t deeply specialised to a project.

And even if you have a decent triage bot, there is no substitute for manual triage. It doesn’t need to take very long.