I used to think that there is no harm in keeping the bug open. I think if you honestly feel that you have the time and resources to go back to the bug and fix it, then by all means keep it open.

But I find that sometimes I can tell from experience that the IR is not actionable and that it will never be fixed. Some examples:

* There's not enough info to reproduce the issue and the user either can't or won't be able to reproduce it themselves. Intermittent bugs generally fall into this category. * The bug was filed against some version of the software that's no longer in production (think of the cloud context where the backend service has been upgraded to a newer version).

Sometimes the cost to investigate a bug is so high relative to the pain caused that it just closed as a WONTFIX. These sometimes suck the most because they are often legitimate bugs with possible fixes, but they will never be prioritized high enough to get fixed.

Or sometimes the bug is only reproducible using some proprietary data that I don't have access to and so you sometimes have no choice but to ask the bug filer "can you still reproduce this?".

Computer systems are complicated. And real-world systems consisting of multiple computer systems are even more complicated.