Thank you so much for the response.
The main problem is that this closing of the issues makes it harder to contribute to Mapillary. I’ve stopped reporting bugs or checking for feature improvements, as shooting some emails without a public record seems like a waste of my time. In the end it makes me a bit less likely to take pictures.
Many organisations, for example RedHat, do have a public tracker with private or internal issues/bugs. Imagine RedHat closing their public bug tracker - would it make users more or less likely to contribute and continue be users?
I stumbled on some other thread on this, so there seem to be a few users who don’t fancy the closing up of issues that much: Page not found .
Now, regarding how this could be handled… Without knowing the internals I cannot suggest that much, but as you mentioned you use Github internally anyway, it seems like keeping the platform is the best bet. I’ve seen quite a few teams manage public + private issues fairly well, and even with manual syncing the effort was well worth the benefits it provided (less duplicated effort, better relationship with the community etc).
You said that “This did not work” for Mapillary. Is it possible to expand on that a bit? Was it an organisational culture issue, with some contributors thinking the public issues - and community - are not worth the attention, or something else?