"Thanks so much for spending time on this amazing patch. We really appreciate it. However I do not think this is something we want to add right now, because of

"Thanks so much for spending time on this amazing patch. We really appreciate it. However I do not think this is something we want to add right now, because of yadda yadda but in the future this can change. Thanks so much!" This tells us you are a big liar even if they didn't read your post. If a patch is amazing it should be merged, if it's not then it's obviously not amazing. This kind of message is not useful. You should be more explicit in explaining the reasons you are not accepting the patch. If you don't want the feature other contributors won't even try to write it in another way before convincing you to accept the feature. If you like the feature but didn't like the patch this should be stated if you could be kind enough to explain why you didn't like the patch, they (or others) could try other approaches. Most of the times I get a PR I'm not interested in, my response is something like this: "I'm not accepting this PR due to [real reason here]. Please, since I value your time and don't want it wasted, before submitting any PR, please open a ticket to discuss it first. That way I can tell you beforehand whether a change is desired or not and the reasons behind this decision and this would save you some time." This is one of the reasons I decided to stop contributing to Rails long ago. After wasting too much with two patches that got ignored or rejected I decided contributing to Rails didn't worth my time. I often ask about the new feature before working on it. But their usual response was in the line "send us a PR and we can discuss". I feel this is plain wrong because it doesn't respect the contributor's time. They should think about the feature and decide on whether it's desired, acceptable or not. Even though they say they need to take a look at the code to know, this is not true. It's just laziness. And I'm not willing to take some time I could be practicing Mandolin to spend on some changes that have great chances of being ignored. This is a valuable wasted time. Finally, back to the original post: "These are just a few of the techniques we’ve used in the past. I hope if you are a maintainer of a project they are helpful for you, but I would love to know your tips as well." It's hard to believe so, since the blog doesn't accept comments and the author does not say how he would like to get this feedback. Also this is a very selfish behavior in my opinion. I find it really frustrating when I see some idea being brought to discussion in the wide but without a comments session. Lots of what we learn comes from those discussions, sometimes even more than from the original article. When you say you would like to hear the feedback, this is selfish, because only you are going to get that feedback while other readers might be interested as well.