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We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#471

Post by otikik »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #465
mixedbit wrote: post #156

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to…

I don’t agree with this newer idea that has arisen that FOSS authors are “victims.” It’s up to you to set boundaries (or prices) and communicate them, like an adult. If one is still rude and entitled then ban them from the repo, or let people fork, but not before looking in the mirror first and reflecting at your own behavior. (I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when x…

I think "we will ban and publicly shame you if you waste our time" is a very clear and adult boundary.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#472

Post by emmaviolet »

FeistySkink wrote: post #428
emmaviolet wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seein…

It would help if PRs from newly-created or private accounts could stand out. And perhaps PRs from accounts that spam multiple PRs with dozes or hundreds of commits, would have some kind of a warning that only people with write access to repos can see. In fact perhaps GitHub could throttle those accounts from creating that many PRs in the first place. Another suggestion would be trying to figure out if a PR was vibe-c…

That makes a lot of sense, and we've been considering some of those options too so good to know we're on the right track there. On trying to figure out whether a PR was vibe-coded: in some cases it's obvious, but in many cases it's hard to figure that out without AI, and we're not sure we love a solution that requires maintainers to use AI to tackle AI. My hope is that if we can provide some non-AI tools first (disabling PRs, creating more visibility around new users, etc), we can then build better management and triage tools with AI second. We're working on an Issues triage agent now that we hope to bring over to PRs too.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#473

Post by emmaviolet »

zero_shift wrote: post #426
emmaviolet wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seein…

I get a lot of unsolicited PRs on my projects that I don't actually want Turning off PRs would be a good option for several of my repos

Great, we're on it

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#474

Post by nerdsniper »

causalscience wrote: post #44
nchmy wrote: post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

> Is this cultural?

Many of my Indian friends say it is, but sometimes I feel they can be as self-critical of their country as many Americans are of the USA.

Demographics show that it doesn't have to be cultural - it could just be that India has 9x as many people under the age of 35 compared to the USA. Even if we were culturally similar, for every annoying US youngster "hustling" to try to get employment, there would be 9 early-career Indians doing the same. That alone is enough to drown the "Vox Agora" with Indian voices. Chinese citizens generally don't participate in English-language fora, so their large numbers would be massively under-represented.

If anything else is biasing the populations, the difference in numbers could be even more stark.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#475

Post by mixmastamyk »

otikik wrote: post #471
mixmastamyk wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree with this newer idea that has arisen that FOSS authors are “victims.” It’s up to you to set boundaries (or prices) and communicate them, like an adult. If one is still rude and entitled then ban them from the repo, or let people fork, but not before looking in the mirror first and reflecting at your own behavior. (I’m trying to imagine folks painting xfree86 maintainers as victims back in the day when x…

I think "we will ban and publicly shame you if you waste our time" is a very clear and adult boundary.

It could be a childish overreaction. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46718635

As always it depends on the circumstances, but should default to quietly closing with WONTFIX. Others have said Daniel is typically helpful and respectful so there we go.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#476

Post by latexr »

msephton wrote: post #345
TheDong wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt. If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue. I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly…

It says in the curl file that they will ridicule time-wasters in public and here is one pression confirming that it happened to them, yet somehow that's not enough? Come on.

If you follow cURL’s development, what you’ll see is the main contributors tend to be extremely patient, helpful, and thankful of contributions. Sometimes too patient. If you look at the HackerOne slop reports cURL got, you’ll see Daniel accommodating people outright wasting their time.

So if you follow what’s been happening, you know the types of reports this message is talking about. What they consider time-wasters are slop reports where the reporter didn’t do any effort to even test the “bug” and then keeps pasting whatever the LLM says in replies and lying about using them.

In other words, for a legitimate report it’s hard to believe that was the reaction. I would expect them to be patient with a human contributor which really put in the work. It’s particularly hard to believe the maintainers would even waste their time to lambast someone on Reddit. Doesn’t seem like their style.

Maybe the person in this thread is exaggerating, maybe they misinterpreted it, or maybe it did happen. But it seems so out-of-character that some proof would be warranted, especially since it’s a single report.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#477

Post by holowoodman »

emmaviolet wrote: post #404
ohyoutravel wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples proje…

GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seein…

Make it possible to turn off PRs from new accounts, accounts with a low PR acceptance rate or accounts that create lots of PRs all at once in unrelated projects. Or mark those kinds of PRs in a visible special way. Or make those kinds of issues and PRs non-public so that maintainers can silently drop them without creating publicity for the slop-spammers.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#478

Post by joshlemer »

ambicapter wrote: post #286
Retr0id wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the bug?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if GP never answered this request for simple follow-up.

Not really. They said in their comment they deleted their whole account and everything. They probably don't want to continue to be ridiculed and to link the identity of that account with this one.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#479

Post by Cort3z »

smsm42 wrote: post #437
Cort3z wrote: post #364

I wonder if there is a way to blanket prevent these types of problems. Possible solutions I can think of: - Require an account with a paid service. Fix = require money - Require an account verified with real ID/passport etc. Fix = link to real person - Automated reply system to "waste tokens" if it is an AI that is responding. Fix is increased cost of spammer. - Have some kind of "vetting system" where you get on an…

That would shut down all drive-by contributions, which may not be a good source of big improvements, but are a good source of information about bugs/maintenance issues. I.e. if I find a rare corner case where the code breaks, for an open source project I'd usually take some time to report it properly. But there's no way I'd pay for the privilege or bother to register with my governmental ID.

I agree, but if there were a common place where everyone did the registration once, it might be less of a problem. Something similar to the «verified» accounts on twitter etc.

I can imagine GitHub becoming this filter somehow

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#480

Post by brovonov »

wojciii wrote: post #390
brovonov wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not contributors, they are spammers. There is a difference. Do you reply to spammers with friendly greetings?

I should really. They are also people. Probably bored at "work" in some slum in Nigeria. I'll try to strike a conversation with a spammer next time I can't sleep. Thanks for a great suggestion.

But you won't. Let's be real here. Yeah, lets gently remind ai spammers that they are truly helping but submitting bogus Issues, PRs, bug bounties, or whatever. Just like scammers from fake call centers, they are only in it for the money and hoping one hit sticks.
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