> Google had their own versions of things. IIRC bugs had both a priority and s everity for some reason (they were the same 99% of the time) between 0 and 4. So a standard bug was p2/s2. p0/s0 was the most severe and meant a serious user-facing outage. People would often change a p2/s2 to p3/s3, which basically meant "I'm never going to do this and I will never look at it again".

Yeah, I've done that. I find it much more honest than automatically closing it as stale or asking the reporter to repeatedly verify it even if I'm not going to work on it. The record still exists that the bug is there. Maybe some day the world will change and I'll have time to work on it.

I'm sure the leadership who set SLAs on medium-priority bugs anticipated a lot of bugs would become low-priority. They forced triage; that's the point.

> People even wrote automated rules to see if their bugs filed got downgraded to alert them.

This part though is a sign people are using the "don't notify" box inappropriately, denying reporters/watchers the opportunity to speak up if they disagree about the downgrade.