5 ms·
Exactly. I’ve denied so many PR’s which only fixed a typo in comments or some other trivial thing. I know what they’re doing.
by CapmCrackaWaka 3y ago
Exactly. I’ve denied so many PR’s which only fixed a typo in comments or some other trivial thing. I know what they’re doing.
- jackdh 3y agoYou deny PR's just for typo's? I've done a few of those in the past all in good faith, perhaps I'm the bot?
- CapmCrackaWaka 3y agoNo I have denied PRs that _only_ fixed a typo. Edited to be more clear.
- jawiggins 3y agoSo you’ve just left the typo in the project? I’ve opened PRs just to fix one or two misplaced characters before. Just trying to do my part to help
- jorvi 3y agoCould just fix the typo yourself and reference the PR in your commit then close the PR without pulling. I imagine contributors won’t exactly be happy with that though.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoHonestly, who cares if the end result is the same? Their forked repo with the patch on still exists, the patch was incorporated in whatever way made sense to the original repo owner. OK, a credit, but really, who cares? People can see what an accepted pull request consisted of, so I'm not sure they're kidding anybody in terms of boosting their reputation with credits for fixing typos. All the same, I'm just glad to see people improve their presentation, especially typos.
- hu3 3y agoI probably submitted more than 10 PRs that only fixed a single word in projects I like. I do that when I see typos in documentation.
- myko 3y agoSame, and I appreciate similar contributions to my own projects
- superchink 3y agoI had the same thought. Is fixing typos not contributing? Should I not be submitting PRs to help with documentation/polish/etc? I never even thought that trying to help would be viewed as malicious.
- badrequest 3y agoI issued a PR to correct a typo in a popular ML library just two weeks ago, I am not a bot, this strategy seems flawed.
- jacquesm 3y agoAny mechanism to combat abuse will have false positives as well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- irrational 3y agoWhat proof do you have that you are not a bot?
- dhosek 3y agoHe passed the Voight-Kampff test.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sieabahlpark 3y ago[dead]
- Tepix 3y agoWell, i submitted such a PR today. It hasn't been rejected (just yet).
- pcthrowaway 3y agoI think the people responding are missing the point. I've also submitted PRs that just fixed typos, and I've considered that a legit contribution. But if I maintained a high-profile project right now, I'd at least take pause in thinking some of these accounts could be spam reputation-boosting accounts that only make comments/PRs to lend legitimacy to the account when it ultimately stars some artificially boosted repo. And making it harder to detect star manipulation erodes the signals of trust which have been used on Github, and ultimately can be a security concern (historically I've looked at numbers of contributors, stars, downloads, and issues open/closed as a rough idea of how secure some npm dependency might be.. basically the idea that "more eyeballs" can mean slightly less chance of a massive security issue, especially in security-critical code like oauth libraries) I don't know what the solution is here. Maybe requiring people sign a CLA like some corporate open source projects do is at least enough of a barrier
- stronglikedan 3y agoDenying that PR and fixing it yourself is taking credit for others' work, and leaving it in is no good either. I don't see any upside to rejecting them. I'd be ashamed of myself for that.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoProject maintainers frequently hold themselves back with amateur presentation, and that includes typos. It's hard to take some things seriously if they are failing at English, let alone their programming language of choice. It's sad because there's plenty of amazing open source out there, but the presentation is terribad. IMO, the solution is simple: allow project maintainers to disable pointless metrics that would incentivize the GitHub equivocal to karma farming. I also think the quality of comment on HN suffers for the fact that the karma score is visible metric to the end-user. Reddit particularly. The view count on tweets too.
- admtal 3y agoSomeone submitted a PR to me yesterday on my open source repo fixing a typo — did not occur to me it was part of this strange con
- somsak2 3y agohow is it a con if it's a useful contribution? it's not my job to filter bot accounts used for starring repos. if a PR improves my project I'll accept it.
- lazide 3y agoIf it’s useful (actually), it’s not a con on you of course! It does pollute the overall ecosystem though, since it is used to prop up fake stars and the like.
- freedomben 3y agoIt probably was legitimate. There are tons of people (myself included) that send PRs to fix typos and such. I also accept PRs like that to my own projects. A lot more people will read the docs than the code, and typos are annoying and for some people highly distracting (OCD)
- foobiekr 3y agoIt probably was not legitimate. There are wonderful people like you but they are dwarfed by the thousands of scam accounts using this method to try and engineer legitimacy.
- tompt 3y agoDo you then fix the typo with no attribution to the original reporter? Or do you just choose not to fix a known error because you question the motives of the reporter?
- sieabahlpark 3y ago[dead]
- arp242 3y agoUsually this is stuff like fixing "// TODO: this fails reguarly in the CI" (real example from the last such PR). It's the kind of thing I'll fix if I see it, but not really worth going out of my way fixing something like that: it's just a comment in some test code (not user-facing) and the few people that will ever see that comment understand "reguarly" as well. It's a non-issue and basically just spam IMHO. These are always either bots or people looking to bolster their CV by bragging they "contributed" n PRs to n repos. I signed up to collaboratively make some (hopefully nice) software, not to deal with a stream of PRs like this. Typos in README or publicly facing docs are different; I usually merge those (and those are almost always good faith too, because usually a real human picks up on them before the bots/script kiddies do).
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoLol so you didn't accept PRs to "own the bots"? Your horse might be a bit too high you know.
- throwaway675309 3y agoSame. There ought to be a way to submit inconsequential things like typos through a separate system that don't get counted as pull requests. That way the people who are genuinely claiming good faith shouldn't really care if it doesn't count as part of your "PR score".