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I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the R

I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the README. Now it makes sense. I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.

justinclift 6y ago
Yeah. Best approach I can think of would be something like: Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull Requests on GitHub. :) The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :( Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :) eg combine encouragement for the bit they got right + info on what needs work, and point them in the right direction for fixing it Some people will probably just not be bothered, but others might get involved in the suggested way. Hopefully. :)
- dpcx 6y ago
  The problem is that this takes time. On one PR, sure, okay. But if you have 50 of the spammy PRs, even with Copy and Paste, this will take several minutes (maybe up to an hour, depending) of a maintainers day (and really, per day, however long Hacktoberfest goes on). That's time that they're not spending coding or updating docs in a valid way or spending with family. It would probably be tenable if there were some heuristic that was 100% certain that this was a spammy PR, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  This assumes that the spammers can code/contribute in a meaningful way.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Don't waste your time. The people doing this don't know anything about programming. There's no reason to ever look at or respond to PR from someone who doesn't at least have their own repo (or at least a fork of a repo) with non trivial commits (at least to a toy/learning project)

justinclift 6y ago

Yeah. Best approach I can think of would be something like: Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull Requests on GitHub. :) The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :( Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :) eg combine encouragement for the bit they got right + info on what needs work, and point them in the right direction for fixing it Some people will probably just not be bothered, but others might get involved in the suggested way. Hopefully. :)

dpcx 6y ago
The problem is that this takes time. On one PR, sure, okay. But if you have 50 of the spammy PRs, even with Copy and Paste, this will take several minutes (maybe up to an hour, depending) of a maintainers day (and really, per day, however long Hacktoberfest goes on). That's time that they're not spending coding or updating docs in a valid way or spending with family. It would probably be tenable if there were some heuristic that was 100% certain that this was a spammy PR, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
908B64B197 6y ago
This assumes that the spammers can code/contribute in a meaningful way.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

Don't waste your time. The people doing this don't know anything about programming. There's no reason to ever look at or respond to PR from someone who doesn't at least have their own repo (or at least a fork of a repo) with non trivial commits (at least to a toy/learning project)