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PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

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Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#101

Post by csomar »

newswasboring wrote: post #93
IshKebab wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be at all surprised if Github adds a first party reputation system. It would be a clever way to increase network effects - imagine if you host on Codeberg you're inundated by AI PRs but on Github you can easily filter them out. I can't see those pull request limits working very well. It's like trying to filter email spam by just rate limiting people. It's going to be annoying for the people you actually w…

If we want to keep it objective, one metric can already be calculated based on the user history of the submitter. The spammers profile will be full of unmerged or abandoned prs. Just based on those statistics beginners might be close to zero rating but spammers would be negative. Unless I totally missed that people are also making new accounts of each PR.

Create lots of fake repos/prs to improve your ratio?

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#102

Post by janalsncm »

VortexLain wrote: post #95
decimalenough wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Orgs exist in GitHub, and it seems reasonable that if the $BIGCORP org limits membership to employees, you can automatically trust all members of that org. Because this way, if one steps out of line, you have both an escalation path (contact admins) and a stick (revoke trust in entire org).

Allowing contributions only from big tech companies sounds ideologically questionable from free/libre software movement perspective, and it emboldens decisions which go against the user's interests, such as removing manifestv2 in Chromium.

It doesn’t have to just be companies. It could be some kind of guild with standards and application criteria. That group could vet members and kick them out for posting slop code.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#104

Post by eloisius »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88
guidoiaquinti wrote: post #55

GitHub just recently added configurable PR limits for maintainers to help partially address this problem: https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/how-pull-request...

> Draft pull requests will not count towards your limit. Disappointing, it seems that those also need limits too, although the limit could be higher. I could easily see the limit for PRs be at 1 for untrusted contributors, and drafts at 3-5.

It would be cool if they took the approach Flickr does to groups. You can submit your photo to groups (a kind of curated collage, usually with a certain theme or aesthetic). But the admin can have certain rules, like the photo can only be submitted to a certain number of groups in total, or a limit on how many photos you submit. Some groups are interesting with rules like you can submit only a single picture.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#105

Post by moritzwarhier »

gus_massa wrote: post #94
gwbas1c wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Draft pull requests will not count towards your limit. Disappointing, it seems that those also need limits too, although the limit could be higher. I could easily see the limit for PRs be at 1 for untrusted contributors, and drafts at 3-5.

I'd just limit the total. Otherwise people will use it to game the system.

Or using it correctly... depends on what your system is, or more accurately, your policy on reviewing or quickly merging PRs with "Draft" status.

As long as it's taken as an indicator for WIP, it works. It just doesn't work when acting illiterate of this distinction; and I have often have had PRs switched to "ready", reviewed + merged in a couple of hours.

But when the change list grows, and the PR ages, while still being intentionally maintained, the Draft signal is strong and helpful IMO. Switching an old Draft PR to "ready" after reviving it with changes seems like a useful signal to me.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#106

Post by fragmede »

SoftTalker wrote: post #44
morkalork wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single job application form that has a field for your github profile is at fault for this. Juniors trying to break into the industry are trying very hard to check every box.

I've never asked for or looked at anyone's github or personal code as part of a job interview. Too easy to fake, and too much risk that it's something proprietary that could put me in a bad spot.

Huh? Proprietary code sometimes leaks on GitHub, but open source code hosted on GitHub is the opposite of proprietary. What bad spot are you going to get into?

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#107

Post by Chu4eeno »

alexpotato wrote: post #86
Chu4eeno wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically one of the first recognizable spam campaigns was perpetrated by lawyers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

On the flip side, the lawyers that represented the big tech firms at the time were some of the most impressive people I've ever met. You could speak to them as a peer when it came to technical issues or system architecture AND they were experts in technology law. Especially impressive given that anti-spam was still in it's infancy and rapidly evolving.

Yeah, I didn't mean to slight lawyers in general, some of my best friends are lawyers (one of them even convinced me to switch to Signal before it was cool).

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#108

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #44
morkalork wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single job application form that has a field for your github profile is at fault for this. Juniors trying to break into the industry are trying very hard to check every box.

I've never asked for or looked at anyone's github or personal code as part of a job interview. Too easy to fake, and too much risk that it's something proprietary that could put me in a bad spot.

[deleted]

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#109

Post by SoftTalker »

fragmede wrote: post #106
SoftTalker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never asked for or looked at anyone's github or personal code as part of a job interview. Too easy to fake, and too much risk that it's something proprietary that could put me in a bad spot.

Huh? Proprietary code sometimes leaks on GitHub, but open source code hosted on GitHub is the opposite of proprietary. What bad spot are you going to get into?

Often times, candidates are currently employed, likely at a competitor. Any code they write can potentially be claimed as a work product and I want no part of that possibility.
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