  Although issues of open source software are created to discuss and solve
technical problems, conversations can become heated, with discussants getting
angry and/or agitated for a variety of reasons, such as poor suggestions or
violation of community conventions. To prevent and mitigate discussions from
getting heated, tools like GitHub have introduced the ability to lock issue
discussions that violate the code of conduct or other community guidelines.
Despite some early research on locked issues, there is a lack of understanding
of how communities use this feature and of potential threats to validity for
researchers relying on a dataset of locked issues as an oracle for heated
discussions. To address this gap, we (i) quantitatively analyzed 79 GitHub
projects that have at least one issue locked as too heated, and (ii)
qualitatively analyzed all issues locked as too heated of the 79 projects, a
total of 205 issues comprising 5,511 comments. We found that projects have
different behaviors when locking issues: while 54 locked less than 10% of their
closed issues, 14 projects locked more than 90% of their closed issues.
Additionally, locked issues tend to have a similar number of comments,
participants, and emoji reactions to non-locked issues. For the 205 issues
locked as too heated, we found that one-third do not contain any uncivil
discourse, and only 8.82% of the analyzed comments are actually uncivil.
Finally, we found that the locking justifications provided by maintainers do
not always match the label used to lock the issue. Based on our results, we
identified three pitfalls to avoid when using the GitHub locked issues data and
we provide recommendations for researchers and practitioners.
