alt Hacker NewsI contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples projects in their history, and have some truly awful LLM generated GitHub “about me” page complete with emojis and links to their GitHub “projects.”
My suspicion is somehow the perception became that if you’re brand new and land a PR in a major open source repo (even as simple as rewording a phrase in a doc that doesn’t need to be reworded), that would help them get a job (they’re always Open to Work on their GitHub about me page).
It’s so much noise that it’s hard to find the real issues.
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Everything about this is exactly what is happening in OWASP repos.
GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seeing. Many new users are also motivated by learning and community, and not familiar enough with the community expectations to know how to seek that differently.
We have tried a lot here in the past (good first issues, more community support for new users), but haven't found a perfect solution yet. Internally, we're looking at options for admins to disable PRs on repos, or limit PRs to collaborators only, for example. From your comment, it seems like part of the challenge you're experiencing as a user is around Issues specifically. We've also been looking at options to delete PRs and Issues individually and in bulk, which could help after the event. Would welcome any feedback on other paths we could take here.