I'm a long-term FLOSS contributor, but I've also served on the boards of 501(c)(3)s, I've been a mentor for Google Summer of Code for most of the times the prog

I'm a long-term FLOSS contributor, but I've also served on the boards of 501(c)(3)s, I've been a mentor for Google Summer of Code for most of the times the programme has run and I've run workshops at my local university about getting involved in open source. I know what is involved in making a community welcoming to new contributors. If a project is putting an explicit call for contributions in updates that implies they're not getting as many as they'd like, which fits my experiences. What you say about hackers getting nerd-sniped is true, but "that's just how coders are" certainly isn't. If you're a core developer for a project and you want the community to grow rather than diminish it's your responsibility to make it socially welcoming as well as having a low technical barrier to entry. I personally have spent many hours responding to emails about problems I could have fixed trivially, but if I'd done that the potential new contributor may not have grown into someone that's regularly fixing bugs I can't fix trivially. I'm not taking the unwelcoming attitude personally, I'm acting accordingly. If I can't get the information from a community I need to participate but I can get them to do the work by just throwing it over the fence I'd be crazy to continue to try and help them unless I have a very strong reason to outside of requiring fixes. As to your point about reading minds, this is specifically mentioned in my initial comment. I asked about a problem running tests, and when I provided the context that I was asked for (I'm trying to put together a patch for this bug) there should have been no question as to motivation.