Why does this company use the Slashdot logo?
It's so ironic as the website screams vibe-coded design on top of that.
We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
121–130 of 254 posts
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like a great idea until you think about it for more than 30 seconds. Similar to most "it's so easy, you just" ideas. Seriously, chill, then think about how you'd implement it. Then think how it'd go wrong. Then think about how to fix those problems. Repeat until you realize there's a better solution or until you solve the problem without making it overly convoluted. More often than not the former is the b…
This is an overly negative response to a genuine solution. There are a million reasons you shouldn't do X or Y. More than likely GitHub would have to maintain their own internal wallet solution for this, which is a big engineering lift. But we're all just having a discussion.
> to a genuine solution
> More than likely GitHub would have to maintain their own internal wallet solution
> This is an overly negative response
There's two types of lazy, and this is the kind that creates more work, not less
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow, and I'd be concerned that this opens up a cottage industry of bots generating plausible looking repositories that unwitting contributors would attempt to contribute to. We already know that bots are astroturfing repos to generate overinflated star counts. I'd say the least crap option here is to honeypot PR contributions from bots
This feels like bot logic, lol. Unless the contributors don't care about the repos they contribute to, this is not a likely scenario. AI doesn't care. We do.
What is bot logic exactly?
You keep describing this as not a likely or realistic scenario. But why is the likelihood even of relevance here? The way to avoid the worst case i.e scammed of your money, is to not even put it on the table in the first place.
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an evergreen internet comment right here. Condescendingly proclaiming "This problem could be easily solved by [significantly worse solution that had 1/10th the thought put into it as the actual solution by people with a stake in actually solving the problem rather than making quippy armchair comments]". --- I know it's against convention to comment on downvotes, but really? Really? This is controversial? The…
Github already has the payment infrastructure. Polar.sh is already doing things that are a lot more complex in this space. If you are in a civilized country which allow direct payments (i.e, anything but North American nowadays) and you don't want to deal with Github or any external system, there is always good old "make a M-PESA/SEPA/Pix/UPI transfer to account XYZ") > the thought put into it as the actual solution…
> Github already has the payment infrastructure.
...which is not available to maintainers to use in this way.
> there is always good old "make a M-PESA/SEPA/Pix/UPI transfer to account XYZ"
And then lock out anyone who is not from the same country as the maintainer, on a platform that is known for its global reach.
Moreover, you're introducing significant anti-human friction. For privacy-conscious people, it's a complete non-starter; I'm not giving my payment information, not for a $1 transaction, and compromising my anonymity just to make a PR for the benefit of other people. That's a small subset. Then, you have the lazy people. The majority of the population will simply not bother with something if it has friction. Getting out their credit card is one of those things, and it's why products/services that offer free trials or a free tier tend to be overwhelmingly more successful -- people want to see a tangible benefit to themselves before they engage in high-friction processes (where "high-friction" is as little friction as requiring a payment, yes). "Free to play" video games with microtransactions engineer first-time purchases to be cheap ($1 or $5) and have 5x or 10x the value of the normal microtransactions, because that first hurdle of getting somebody to hand over their payment information is by far the biggest.
I'll take the captcha, thanks. And maintainers will too, because they'd rather have the solution that filters bots and keeps humans contributing rather than the one that filters out both humans and bots.
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#125Makes 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…
This would just hurt new users similar to how you are unable to comment on 90% of subreddits on Reddit as a new user, because you don't have enough karma points, or how on Stackoverflow your permissions are severely limited until you do certain jobs. The incentives aren't very good in systems like this. Bots can be made to easily game the system while regular users are discouraged from even participating.
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#126[flagged]
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#127'I will take "problems that could be easily be solved by implementing a Pfand system" for $200, Alex.' Seriously. Just ask for a US$10 deposit for the each PR. If the PR is accepted (not even merged, just accepted as "this is a good effort"), give it back. Hell, give double the amount for good effort and you got yourself a cheap way to attract good contributors. Best case, bots will balk at the payment. Worst case, t…
Possibly the worst idea I've heard this month.
No one, meat or chip, would just set aside $10 "for the opportunity to contribute"
This is "let them eat cake" level of out of touchness.
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#128While git has always allowed this, I don't really like the idea that someone can write some code, slap my name on it, and push it to their repo.
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#129While git has always allowed this, I don't really like the idea that someone can write some code, slap my name on it, and push it to their repo.
I think this is why signed commits are also supported. My first thought was that this probably doesn’t work with signed commits. But, maybe it does since they are listed as the commiter.
Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
#130I'm not sure why gh hasn't already implemented stricter measures / filters / tools for PRs. It would cut down on spam and also help save their servers that can't handle the increased AI load!
Repos get forked, code gets pushed, all before a PR is created. What kind of measures can be implemented to cut down on the AI-general forks and pushes?
You can fork and push all you want. The problem is specifically when you show up in my notifications with your junk PR.