Open the Issues tab on any active project and you will find the closest thing GitHub has to a public conversation about what is broken, what is wanted, and what nobody can agree on.
Issues are not just bug reports. They are feature requests, design debates, user complaints, and sometimes long arguments about the right way to do something. On many public repositories, anyone with a GitHub account can open one. The team can respond, close it, label it, or ignore it. All of that is visible to you.
What you are actually looking at
Each issue has a title, a body, a status (open or closed), and a thread of comments below it. You do not need to understand every technical detail in that thread. What you are reading for is pattern and tone.
Look at the open issues first. The ratio of open to closed tells you something immediately. A project where thousands of issues have been closed and a few hundred sit open is a team that works through problems rather than lets them pile up. A project where open issues have no responses, no labels, and no recent activity is a different story. The number matters less than what is being done with them.
Look at the closed issues too. A long list of closed issues tells you the team is working through problems. It is a sign of life.
Labels are your shortcut
Most teams label their issues. Common labels include bug, enhancement, question, good first issue, and wontfix. These are set by the maintainers, so they vary from project to project, but they give you a fast read on what kind of attention a project is getting.
If you see a lot of wontfix or closed as not planned, that tells you something about the team's priorities. If you see enhancement issues stretching back two years with no movement, that tells you something about capacity or ambition.
The tone of the thread reveals the culture
Read a few issue threads, especially contested ones. Are the maintainers responsive? Do they explain their decisions, or just close things without comment? Is the community respectful, or is it full of pressure and frustration?
Concrete signs of a healthy culture: maintainers reply with reasons rather than just closing, duplicate issues get linked to the original rather than dismissed, and bug reports prompt follow-up questions about how to reproduce the problem. Those small habits add up to a team that takes the work seriously.
A project can be technically excellent and still have a hostile or disorganised community around it. For anything you plan to build on, adopt, or recommend, the culture of that community matters. You are not just evaluating code. You are evaluating whether problems will get fixed and whether questions will get answered.
Search issues before anything else
If you are evaluating a project for a specific reason, say you are wondering whether it works with a particular tool, or whether a known bug has been fixed, search the issues before you read anything else.
The search bar on the Issues tab filters by keyword. Type in your concern and see what comes up. You will often find that someone else already ran into the same problem, documented it in detail, and got a response. That thread can save you hours.
What open issues with no response tell you
A project where issues sit for months without a maintainer acknowledging them is not necessarily abandoned, but it is understaffed. For open source work maintained by a small team or a single person, this is common. For a commercial product with a paying user base, it is a warning sign.
The gap between when an issue was opened and when someone first responded is a useful signal. If the average first response is two days, the team is paying attention. If it is six months, they are not.
The difference between bugs and feature requests
Bugs mean something is broken. Feature requests mean people want the project to do something it does not yet do. Both are useful, but they tell you different things.
A project with many open bug reports and slow responses has a quality problem. A project with many open feature requests and active discussion is probably healthy and popular. People only bother requesting features from projects they think have a future.
Start thinking of the Issues tab as a project's health record. A clean bill of health is not zero issues. It is a record of problems being noticed, addressed, and closed.