x.y.z is no longer an issue target in Drupal 5.0

This message is cross-posted to the "issue tracking and software releases" group because of the 5.0 functionality that prompted me to write it,, but is primarily intended for the Issue Triage group. Perhaps I'm only groping for a larger audience -)

Now that Drupal.org is running 5.0 RC2 / HEAD, project.module has seen some great changes - among them is that "x.y.z" is no longer accepted as a version for issues. For many issues in core (63 pages plus 7, or 1267 total), the first thing anyone following-up will see is the error message:

x.y.z is not a valid version, please select a different value.

For the same states, statistics show only 2255 totals issues for all versions—therefore 56% of issues aren't tied to any version of core! This provides an excellent opportunity to purge dead issues from the queue. Here are some example cases:

Irrelevant

Example: 1052. Some bugs, feature- and support requests refer to features of core that no longer exist, or have been replaced by contrib modules.

Stale

Example: 8521, 24012. Support requests more than a year old. Is it reasonable to assume the submitter has found a fix, upgraded or given up? Can these be automatically closed? What's a length of time that would make a support request 'stale'?

Prehistoric Ancestor

Example: 572 (three digits!) & 97155. I posted in response to a feature request, now knowing it had similar concerns to a much, much older one. What should be done? Is the new one a duplicate of the old? It contains more relevant information. Should the old be closed, or marked won't fix with a link to the new issue? In any case, there are several examples of this situation that could be cleaned up. It's also plausible there are other issues on the same topic between the oldest and newest example.

Some actions might require confirmation from the original poster - for example, to ask them what version they were experiencing a bug in. If the user doesn't respond to the e-mail notification of a response to their issue (within a reasonable amount of time, perhaps a couple of weeks), perhaps their account is inactive, the e-mail address is no longer valid or they no longer care enough to respond. In any case, the issue is 'abandoned', and can probably be closed.

Any comments are welcome!