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Yes, botspam is bad. But if a change is good. A change is good, merge it and get on with your life. If someone wants to write "check_spelling_bot" and get a

• bastawhiz 3y ago
  I've never seen "good" changes from these bots. The code they propose often isn't even working, it's just a change that looks like it might do something. Some of the spellcheck changes might be beneficial, but there's an ethical question about whether accepting those PRs (versus making the change in a new commit directly) is a net-negative to the community overall. If you got spam, but the spam was useful to you personally, not marking it as spam prevents your email provider from flagging the account as spam to the wider world.
  • vikramkr 3y ago
    But if it's useful I'd argue it's deifinitionally not spam for you. And if most people don't mark it as spam so it doesn't get flagged, that means it just isn't spam. Bots send emails too, and not all bot sent emails are spam. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
    • shkkmo 3y ago
      > But if it's useful I'd argue it's deifinitionally not spam for you. That is absolutely false. Spam is not defined based on it's utility, but based on whether a message is solicited. If the author of a repo hasn't signed their repo up for an automated PR bot, that bot sending out PRs is absolutely spam.
      • vikramkr 3y ago
        Most definitions for it include whether the message is irrelevant or unwanted. Trying to define it purely as unsolicited gets into weird cases where you'd say that an emergency tornado alert is spam because it's unsolicited. Maybe there's a definition if spam where that's the case but if the residents of an area find that alert useful it seems unlikely that they would describe it as spam, even though they didn't solicit the warning
        • shkkmo 3y ago
          I don't see any definition that address "irrelevancy" but many do mention "unwanted", which is effectively the same thing as saying "unsolicited". Edit: Emergency alerts are solicited by owning a phone in a country that mandates that cell carriers send those messages.
          • vikramkr 3y ago
            For me googling spam definition brings up google definition in which irrelevant is the first word. Before getting sidetracked on definitions of other words, I would be deeply surprised if asking a bunch of people on the street "If you received a message you didn't ask for and didn't expect, but it turns out you are very glad you received it and it provided you value, is that spam?" resulted in a broad consensus around "yes" Unwanted and unsolicited are definitely not the same thing, whether or not you solcit something has nothing to do with if you want it, I'm not sure how those are synonymous. And if being mandated to recieve a message by someone else counts as you soliciting the message, where solicit in its most common definition means to ask for, then I guess that means that everything is solicited?
            • shkkmo 3y ago
              Since you failed to post the "google definition", here's the one I get at the top when googling "spam definition" > Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail. Note, "unsolicited" is the first word and "irrelevant" does not appear anywhere and there is no discussion of the utility of the message to the recipient.
          • guitarbill 3y ago
            > Edit: Emergency alerts are solicited by owning a phone in a country that mandates that cell carriers send those messages. That's so pedantic, I'm inclined to disagree - if it's even correct. Not everything that's unsolicited is spam. An unsolicited thank you note isn't spam. More components of spam are traditionally a large, indiscriminate number of receivers, and low quality messaging. Irrelevancy does partially capture both of these.
• somsak2 3y ago
  this is valuing a humans time of filtering through good and not good changes at 0. Imagine if you had to receive all email and judge each individual one for spam / not spam.
• bombcar 3y ago
  PR spam is annoying, you end up with “oxford-comma-bots” fighting “no-oxford-commas” forever to get credibility.
  • canadianfella 3y ago
    [dead]