I maintain a many projects which are not huge, but some are in the thousands of Github stars and often get an issue or two per day. Across all of my projects I

I maintain a many projects which are not huge, but some are in the thousands of Github stars and often get an issue or two per day. Across all of my projects I probably see 10-20 new issues per week. My approach is straightforward: help them help themselves. We have some easy things we can do to encourage people to find the information they need to sort out the problem, coaxing out of them debug logs, core dumps, and so on, and sometimes give them our suspicions about the problem. Then we tell them to start digging, and that we're around to answer questions if they need help finding their problem. This process ends with a patch from that user. My projects also often have an IRC channel, where users often help each other with straightforward issues, and we never have to get involved. Sometimes a dev is paying attention and will give them the same rundown. If someone seems enthusiastic about digging and making a fix, they're invited to the dev IRC where they can receive more developer-oriented support in understanding the code and introducing them to the contribution workflow. Sure, it's not the friendliest approach for anyone who isn't willing or able to figure it out themselves. But we're all volunteers and no one is going to volunteer their time to do something they dislike. We volunteered to write code because we like writing code. End-user support is not fun for us. If you like it, volunteering to do it is easy and has basically no onboarding time, you just show up in the support channels and start helping people.