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We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

archestra.ai

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Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#11

Post by marginalx »

silverwind wrote: post #5

PR spam is a major problems for repo that run bounties. Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.

Problem is the bots can create any number of github accounts and continue spamming. Though this would be a good simple defense to start with.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#14

Post by hiccuphippo »

silverwind wrote: post #5

PR spam is a major problems for repo that run bounties. Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.

GitHub has not incentive for blocking AI. It's like asking an ad company to build an adblocker into their browser.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#16

Post by arecsu »

Makes me wonder if an ELO-based system would work to mitigate these issues. People who merged PR successfully onto a project, that had real issues acknowledged, the quality of their responses measured by other users reactions or something, etc, multiplied possibly by the degree of importance of the project where their activity has been made. Won't be about human vs AI, but actual helpful effective being vs low effort/spammy contributions. Issues and PRs could be sorted and filtered by their ELO score. I'm saying ELO as analogy to "score based given the context", not really a 1:1 translation of the ELO system.

Negative score would be reports from other users because of spammy content or not acknowledged issues, with a middle ground of neutral score (+-0) or little positive score to issues or whatever with clear good intention, but couldn't reach a proper merged PR or were not issues (e.g. issue existed but wasn't the correct repo to be addressed, PR was good but needed other stuff to be implemented prior to it, maybe in the long run, etc)

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#18

Post by cdrnsf »

silverwind wrote: post #5

PR spam is a major problems for repo that run bounties. Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.

GitHub and Microsoft are actively contributing to the problem, why would they admit fault?

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#19

Post by captn3m0 »

This has a security implication which is overlooked. Contributors to a repository have higher rights, such as avoiding approval requirements for fork PR runs. GitHub warns in the docs:

> When requiring approvals only for first-time contributors (the first two settings), a user that has had any commit or pull request merged into the repository will not require approval. A malicious user could meet this requirement by getting a simple typo or other innocuous change accepted by a maintainer, either as part of a pull request they have authored or as part of another user's pull request.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#20

Post by chrismorgan »

ramon156 wrote: post #15

See, this is an article that uses dashes correctly. It adds value, creates a bit of buildup

This is funny to me because the title on this submission currently refers to “Git's –author flag”, which is an extremely incorrect use of a dash. (The original article doesn’t make the mistake. Not sure if the error is from the submitter or from an HN title mangulation.)
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