alt Hacker NewsGitHub PM here working on how we can make this problem feel better for maintainers. Really appreciate how tiring this can be, especially when even low volume is sustained for many months.
Would love your thoughts on some of the things we're thinking about: - Would it help to disable all PRs? All non-contributor PRs? - Would a "close as admin" button help address the issue of not wanting to be rude or discouraging? - What about Copilot doing an initial review and proposing to close anything that doesn't meet contribution guidelines - would that help a "close this" decision feel less personal?
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My ideal is copilot that would evaluate the PR against some basic guidelines that maintainers write down.
And perhaps a way to filter PRs to just contributor PRs would be easy to implement and pretty useful
As someone on the other side of the PR, the current situation makes things awkward for me, too. Occasionally, I'll make an actual fix to scratch some particular itch I have with the software, and I'm hesitant to even open a PR, because it's just going to 1. pile yet another PR onto the maintainer, and 2. might get dismissed out of hand because it's mistaken for AI slop or other low-effort spam that these attackers are doing. So, I usually just fork, make the change in my own repo, and leave it at that.
Disabling PRs or limiting PRs to "contributors" would be a signal to me that I should just keep doing that and not contribute back to the main repo.
Good questions, thanks. I'll share this thread with other maintainers. Is this the best place for feedback in a week or two? Or is there a GitHub meta discussion somewhere?