Being able to turn off pull requests would help for cases like this. Though the default GitHub setup also makes contributions unnecessarily difficult to manage

Being able to turn off pull requests would help for cases like this. Though the default GitHub setup also makes contributions unnecessarily difficult to manage. For example, a project can tell if it has been forked but otherwise has no idea what the forker is currently doing! Is the forker working on a possible future contribution (and worse, could that work be duplicating something that is already in progress elsewhere?). There are also plenty of forks that seem to never evolve, not even taking the minimal effort of pulling recent upstream changes. The contribution mechanism could be broken up into different phases, something like: 0. Visitor forks project but this should be invisible, i.e. it is not “your repository” for all to see, since you haven’t actually contributed anything to it yet. 1. Visitor clicks button stating “intention to contribute” that notifies upstream project immediately. This includes information such as the nature of the proposed change. 2. The project maintainer then has the opportunity to communicate immediately, e.g. “sure!” or “please don’t do this, $SOMEONE_ELSE is already doing it” or “I don’t think that is a good idea” or whatever. Then the project can put this into a visible state on the GitHub page so that everyone knows about this in-progress work. 3. Eventually the work is done, and is converted to a Pull Request as opposed to just appearing out of the blue. 4. Once accepted, the repository is publicly listed on your profile since you have made an actual contribution to it.