Stay your pitchforks kids, this is just a logical response to a problem we all have. It may not be perfect (and lacks transparency), but so far it’s the best idea I’ve heard to solving the problem of what is effectively spam in the FOSS community.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a project should be able to vet would-be contributors based on a variety of metrics. We do this with spam blockers in email all the time and while imperfect, is better than leaving email unusable.
The risk of false-positives though is definitely something to think about. Someone shouldn’t be blocked from submitting a PR just because their account is new, but a system which combines a series of metrics:
account age
size of PR
number of similar PRs in the wild and the size of those PRs
accept/reject ratio
any other sort of reputational flags that might make sense
…into a calculable score (as this one appears to do, again: better docs, more transparency please) could be quite valuable.
My main complaint is that it’s on GitHub. Can we all just get the fuck off that dumpsterfire already?
Stay your pitchforks kids, this is just a logical response to a problem we all have. It may not be perfect (and lacks transparency), but so far it’s the best idea I’ve heard to solving the problem of what is effectively spam in the FOSS community.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a project should be able to vet would-be contributors based on a variety of metrics. We do this with spam blockers in email all the time and while imperfect, is better than leaving email unusable.
The risk of false-positives though is definitely something to think about. Someone shouldn’t be blocked from submitting a PR just because their account is new, but a system which combines a series of metrics:
…into a calculable score (as this one appears to do, again: better docs, more transparency please) could be quite valuable.
My main complaint is that it’s on GitHub. Can we all just get the fuck off that dumpsterfire already?