📢 Project Maintenance Update & Community Issue Housekeeping

Hi everyone,
First and foremost, we want to thank you for being an integral part of Swagger's journey and for helping us grow into what we are today. Your contributions, feedback, and passion for the project have been instrumental in Swagger's success. Ironically, it's this very growth-both in adoption and community engagement - that has created challenges in our ability to respond as quickly and thoroughly as you deserve.
We sincerely apologize for the long response times, and in some cases, the lack of response altogether. Over the last months, our team has been heavily focused on improving the state of the apidom and swagger-editor repositories

🔧 What we've been working on recently

• Added Swagger 2.0 support to the new Swagger Editor
• Released Next Editor as stable
• Released apidom as stable
• Replaced V4 editor with Next Editor
• Delivered numerous stability improvements
• Expanded support for AsyncAPI 3.0 in editor
• Currently working on OAS 3.2 support in editor

These initiatives required significant engineering focus, which unfortunately limited our ability to actively manage the backlog across swagger-core, swagger-parser, and related projects.

🧩 Acknowledging Community Debt
Our community debt has grown beyond what is manageable, especially for issues opened many years ago. Some repositories include issues more than 10 years old, and returning to them meaningfully has become infeasible.
Over recent months, we've worked on improving our internal processes, issue triage flow, and communication. We now feel confident that we can start applying long-needed changes and gradually restore a healthy maintenance cycle.

📌 What's happening next

Some issues are now labeled backlog - this means they are tracked internally and grouped for future review, not ignored
Inactive or outdated issues will be closed over time
All issues created before 2023 will be gradually closed as part of the cleanup

🤝 How you can help
Your contributions can significantly accelerate the process:
✔️ Pull Requests are highly encouraged - even if an issue has a backlog label or is older, a PR immediately increases its priority and helps us move it forward much faster.
✔️ React to issues that matter to you - adding a 👍 or ❤️ reaction helps us understand which issues are the most impactful for the community and should be prioritized.

We also kindly ask for your understanding - while we truly appreciate every contribution, our capacity is limited. We will review PRs and issues as quickly as we can, but we may not always be able to respond immediately. Thank you for your patience and support as we work to improve the maintenance workflow.

🔁 If we close an older issue that you believe is still relevant:
➡️ Please open a new issue
➡️ Include a link to the closed issue

This gives us proper context, allows us to revisit old discussions, and ensures that we evaluate the problem with a fresh and up-to-date perspective.

Thank you for your continued support and understanding.

The Swagger Team

This issue is a project-maintenance announcement and names no file, test, or implementation entry point. There is no concrete change or completion criterion to investigate; a contributor would need a separate, specific issue or pull request before starting work.