How to completely remove an issue from GitHub?
Update Nov 2018: You now can delete issues if you are a owner of the repository!
See "Github - remove issues entered in error"
https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-github/deleting-an-issue mentions:
People with admin permissions in a repository can permanently delete an issue from a repository.
For other people (without permission), questionto42's comment shows that you can ask to GitHub support for the issue to be deleted, as illustrated here.
At May 2018, original answer:
Three 8 years later, and closing issues remains the answer (still no deletion possible).
See "The Ghost of Issues Past", where GitHub advise to check and close:
- issues opened over a year ago
state:open created:<2013-01-01 - the ones I'm involved with
involves:twp state:open created:<2013-01-01 - and those not updated in the last year
involves:twp state:open updated:<2013-01-01
You can edit an existing issue (let's say if it's a duplicate) and you can change the title, description and target milestone to be something completely different. That's as close as you can get to removing the ticket, AFIK.
No, the github API only allows you to open/close/reopen issues. Here's the Issues API docs.