We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
archestra.ai386 points by ildari 9 hours ago
386 points by ildari 9 hours ago
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.
fair point! We believe "Require approval for all external contributors" should be a default setting, as you cannot trust anyone who is not a member of the organization
Actions runs from external contributors aren't run with Actions secrets; if you are using Actions right (i.e. not using pull_request_target wrong) you don't need to trust external contributors. (eta: iirc the original point of the Actions approval flow was preventing cryptomining spam from abusing free compute)
you can't trust org members either I have seen projects have inter maintainer fallouts. In general trust doesn't exist.
If companies can screw you over and claim it's a mistake, there isn't much a person can do.
It's all about level's of trust, a maintainer going rogue is less likely, a past contributor going rogue more likely but not too much, a stranger with a typo pr merged even more likely but still, a complete stranger least trust worthy.
Interesting approach. We’ve seen similar spam/noise problems appear in financial workflow automation too — especially when AI-generated submissions scale faster than manual review processes.
No it doesn't have security implications.
If you are insecure because someone has had one of their otherwise completely innocent PRs merged into your repo... you are insecure, period.
Security isn't a binary "secure/insecure". You can be more or less secure than something.
Screw GitHub for letting this happen. If they implemented some very basic requirements to comment and open PRs we wouldn't be here.
Also please let us delete PRs just like we can delete issues.
We’re currently working on a feature that lets admins archive PRs. The goal is to give maintainers more control over how they manage contributions in their repositories. Archived PRs would be visible to admins only, so maintainers still have access to contributor history for auditing purposes and to meet any organizational or compliance requirements. Would this be helpful for you?
Not OP but requested this feature since years.
Your suggestion would help a bit but I would prefer the opposite: before someone can 'pollute' my pull request space and draw attention from subscribers I would prefer an acceptance step (just like a moderator on a forum) instead of having to archive the PRs.
This is especially important as (AI) spam increases and just because I am away for a few days or weeks I don't want those PRs lurking around.
This is the correct assessment. This is not up to the open source community or individual projects to "figure out", any more than its up to me to figure out how not to get spam email.
Yeah well, our corporate overlords have decided that you're going to take your slop whether you want it or not, so its very much up to us to figure out. Capitalism isn't going to jump off the disaster train any time soon
What is the benefit of deleting a PR over just closing it? It seems like closing has the benefit of signaling what kinds of PRs aren't acceptable, which deleting would lose.
Closing a PR or issue still makes it discoverable in PR/issue search results, as opposed to deleting an issue.
This. But OP wanted special requirements to open a PR. I.e. if those requirements are not met the PR is never visible to all and so admins can reject spam PRs without giving them a platform.
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.
I feel like GitHub should have a system where you can give out tokens that are valid for e.g. 1 PR. If someone shows to engage in meaningful discussion and has a good idea to address an issue/feature, you initially give them one PR token. If the PR is of good quality, you can give them a few more, until they are contributors that can just create PRs as they like.
A similar system would be nice for issues, though I'm not sure what it'd look like if issues are the springboard for contributing PRs.
Not likely to ever happen (as others said), GitHub/MS want to sell CoPilot subscriptions/tokens and LLM-generated PRs are a part of that business model.
My community does something vaguely similar, where you get credit for having bugfix PRs merged, and it's deducted when you get feature PRs merged.
You could use a "OTP" to provide this: give out tokens ("OTP"), anyone with that token can submit, keep a record of the user (eg github username, email address) and token, run a bot to delete submissions that don't have a valid token, check the token+user pair, if there is a mismatch blacklist the user that token was given to whilst removing the PR.
GitHub has not incentive for blocking AI. It's like asking an ad company to build an adblocker into their browser.
It's called Brave
Which is not chrome and still has ads...(Ironically).
The issue here is the core model is broken (misaligned incentives). That's not something you are going to fix with a github "downstream". A token system could help but it's easy to imagine ways that could be gamed, if not implemented well.
Ads are the main business model of browsers.
If search ads are blocked on search engines, then there is no revenue for the browser. It's that simple (on top of that Brave has other revenues, but the majority is search ads).
So it's a game of hoping that the majority won't change the default.
This is the main reason Brave does not block search ads specifically by default, but still block the other ads. Blocking the other ads there are no consequences, since anyway this revenue is not shared back to the browser.
This is why the business model of Brave is cynical.
-> It's the same model as AdBlock and the "Acceptable Ads" (block all ads, except the acceptable ads, unless you disallow them)
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.
GitHub and Microsoft are actively contributing to the problem, why would they admit fault?
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)
ELO is shockingly easy to manipulate. For example there was a literal jail with a decent chess player in it. He created a pool of players who got great ELOs by beating him, then used them to boost his rating higher. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Given any manipulatable scheme, AI will figure out how to manipulate it. For the OP, what happens if a single AI manages to get through to contributor? Then it starts elevating other AIs to contributor, and we're off again. There doesn't have to be a purpose to this. Trolls will troll, and trolls armed with AI bots can devote endless energy to doing so. The more you work to keep them out, the more fun it becomes for them.
I wish I had an answer for that problem. But I don't.
ELO is a bad fit because it requires competition between submitters; but if the idea is interpreted as “contributor karma score” or similar (not everyone’s familiar with the mathematical nature of ELO), then the way to close the loophole is to only consider voting inputs from the human project owner. This project chose to have people lie to a webform rather than lie to a git interface about using AI, so I don’t expect it will be particularly successful at inhibiting AI use by project-involved humans, but certainly it’ll squelch a lot of noise from unattended/passersby.
I think they were saying Elo system as kind of a general ranking system idea instead of the actual algorithm.
You could probably use some kind of pairwise ranking algorithm (like anything based on the Bradley-Terry model) to rate human vs. AI contributions, but that would take a lot of manual effort. Google is using it to (supposedly) improve their searching algorithms. They give testers two different versions and ask them what's better.
fix this problem by make the rating value tied to some paid currency - a repo owner would have to pay for the PR, and that PR contributor will now have more currency than previously. In order to have said currency to pay, the repo owner would need to have contributed to another repo whose owner have currency.
The totality of someone's currency is their reputation.
Of course, now the decision becomes...who is the central currency issuer that creates it?
It's the StackExchange model! This has bootstrapping issues, is hard to break into the community, and risks creating moderator cliques.
>what happens if a single AI manages to get through to contributor
Then they'll get removed by the humans? Its about cutting down work, not about eliminating the work entirely
The current approach removes about 99% of their overhead it would seem. If they have to do a few manual interventions here and there, that seems like a huge win overall
contributors being able to grant contributor to other users seems like a problem
For those wondering what Elo means, it is a person's last name, not an acronym (not all caps). More info here:
Thank you, big fan of ELO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Light_Orchestra and I was a bit confused about the comments.
It's Elo not ELO. Elo is not an acronym.
From what I've seen in the comments, it's definitely ELO, if not through ubiquity alone. Happens to the best of 'em!
I have built something like this and in process of collecting the data.
Frontier users: 527,865 Light indexed: 527,865 Ready to queue: 9,083 Fast scores ready: 0 Activity events 24h: 30,266 Fast scores completed 24h: 19,123 Deep jobs completed 24h: 3,043 Fast-score ETA: n/a Deep-hydrate ETA: 69h Stale running jobs: 0 GitHub backpressure jobs: 19,113 High automation signals: 4,608 Medium automation signals: 1,327 Completed jobs: 74,714
Biggest challenge is Github's rate limits. At this pace it will take two more months to have 98% coverage. But after that the maintenance should be quite straight forward.
Sounds a bit like Mitchell Hashimoto’s Vouch: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
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.
Some kind of vouching or scoring might make sense to help qualify contributions and many people have suggested similar recently. If by "ELO-based system" you meant "some kind of scoring system (not based on Elo)".
The Elo rating system doesn't make sense in this context; it's designed around collecting zero sum game results for a given community of players and building a model around it.
The problem is you want the ELO score based on work on other community projects - you can't assume good faith here.
The problem with that is that there are certain kinds of users that like to take control of community projects. And then they take control of more, and bigger ones.
There are a lot of political tricks that get used.
What is scary is that one of those kinds of users are malicious state actors. Like North Korea and Russia...
This is what we get for telling everyone how amazing AI is at writing code. It started with the people selling AI and for some reason tons of independent developers, some quite well respected in our field, piled on. Facebook now laying people off and saying it's because AI is just so good adds more fuel to the fire. Now you have a bunch of people fully confident that their AI friend is pumping out amazing code and submitting it to projects that are completely overwhelmed
> and for some reason tons of independent developers
Cowboy coders got a virtual cowgirl coder and sold it to everyone, hmm, maybe... (respected or not, solo devs don't always have the requisite skills to not be a cowboy, either due to lack of experience or lack of innate skill)
I don't know that I completely buy this narrative, though. There has been a strong, top-down push for this since the "beginning".
The irony of the .ai domain.
I dont think anything is ironic about it because they aren't suggesting AI is bad. Just that it can be misused.
also, could the website plz fix its scrolling code? its annoying. i can't read the article
"I never thought AI would slop my project!" Says company centered around AI slop
Not just the domain: it's an agentic stack! In other words, I could use their product to create the exact type of PRs they're lamenting here.
Is the solution to everything simply more catgirls [1]? Proof-of-work was, after all, about countering email spam. PR spam is but the latest in that long tradition.
Proof of work doesn’t work here same as it doesn’t work for email. The effort to mint a valid PoW is always going to put the legitimate user at a disadvantage, whatever the implementation is. Someone with an incentive to spam will always be able to do it faster, more efficiently than you.
You can’t submit a PR because your laptop is too slow? Rent some hash rate from someone, and now you’ve just made a system of paying botnet owners to be able to make a typo fix on a github repo. HashCash was never used in the real world for a reason, it sounds cute but the incentives are so insane as to only work in a vacuum where you assume everyone isn’t cheating.
> Someone with an incentive to spam will always be able to do it faster, more efficiently than you.
Sure, but looking at the cost to do it at scale is the wrong metric. I surely can't compete with a career spammer on emails-per-second or even emails-per-dollar, but I also don't need to.
It's more about the expected-value versus the cost. For example, my expected benefit from one email to my family is (while hard to quantify) hopefully much higher than a spammer's expected benefit of one spam email going out, which has a very small chance of leading to any amount of money. Attaching a CPU-churn cost per email is something I can ignore on my desktop, but they have to at least budget for it.
I'd also like to note that the win-condition isn't as extreme as making spam (or other "crimes") truly unprofitable, it just needs to be less profitable than other things the time/resources could be used for.
Agreed, PoW is an especially poor solution here.
We really need to solve SPAM itself here, I think there may be a way to do it. I.e., the problem of spam is NtoN scaling connections. The network has never been able to solve that problem (exponential is the hardest). Limiting communication in terms of mesh networking may be the ultimate solution - bots can't get to you because they can't reach you.
What needs to be invented is a bridging protocol - some way to establish "legitimate" lines of communication over a network, while preserving (to some degree) privacy and decentralization. AI can only enter this network by being explicitly added to the channel, and thereby explicitly and easily blocked (and also solving the general SPAM issue once and for all).
Just like we did with IP addresses. If yours is blocked by Cloudflare, you can pay a botnet operator a few dollars to use theirs! You can even use your credit card through a mostly-legitimate website. It's very convenient.
Anubis is actually not a cat. The original Egyptian deity is a god of death, and has a canine head. Anime catgirls and dog girls can look similar at first glance.
I think Anubis is against crawlers, not against agents that make PRs. PoW doesn't work here, the agent will just do the computation.
> It's not a contract job— it's our optional way of saying thank you to the community.
The writing style in their onboarding doc has common AI tells (in the quote: em dashes, “it’s not A, it’s B” sentence).
I can understand that, perhaps they want to fight fire with fire or don’t have time as they already say. Still, it all feels like inadequate half measures to me.
The entire post is clearly LLM generated. I get that a person clearly put together some thoughts, but prompting an LLM to 'turn this into a blog post' is the kind of low effort content I thought was not appropriate for HN.
At least bringing up the underlying method (restrict to contributors) has spawned the discussion about how that's probably a bad idea on the security side.
Using AI for your own project is different than being overwhelmed by AI contributions from other people/bots
> If the email matches their GitHub account, GitHub links the commit to their profile and grants them contributor status.
When the article mentioned email matching, I was concerned that it would break down when a contributor's email address changes. (I have contributed to more than a few projects over the years, using email addresses that no longer exist.)
However, it looks like they're not using the email address recorded in the author's original git commit, but instead a GitHub-generated address whose unique parts are the GitHub user ID and username. That should survive authors changing their email addresses. It would still break down if a contributor loses access to their account and has to create a new one, but that's probably less common.
> Should we stop giving fun test tasks to our job candidates?
Yes
It seems this particular company makes a payment for completing those tasks, so it might not be that bad.
Developers: stop doing whiteboard interviews, they don't measure anything relevant to the real job
Also devs: stop giving us real world problems to solve
Yeah, fun for who exactly?
Me. That sounds way more fun than inverting a binary tree, and they pay candidates for their time.
While 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.
Yup. At the very least, the "big dogs" aka Github and Gitlab should allow you to "claim" an email address to an account and only link it up when the commit in question either directly got authored from the web UI or got cryptographically signed.
Hi HN community, I wanted to share our approach to reduce amount of AI slop PR's and issues in our repo. We enabled "require prior contribution" flag on GH and created a CI script that creates a tiny commit co-authored with you, if you pass captcha on our website. Worked really well and we were able to block at least 500 bots in the first week. Sharing a screenshot from cloudflare: https://archestra.ai/hn-comment-cloudflare-challenge-outcome...
Yep, this is similar to some other version control tools like Tangled which has vouching.
Who do you add as a contributor though? Wannabe-contributors? Then they appear in the list of contributors before you even see if they're capable of producing an acceptable PR.
Your solution would be great if GitHub would also allow me to whitelist specific users, but unfortunately this still won't block "implementation plans" in comments.
Thats a really elegant solution.
How does the website trigger the CI script? Through GH rest API?
thank you, yep through the rest API, here is the example: https://github.com/archestra-ai/website/blob/29ebdacbd8a22b9...
Woudln't it be trivial to farm the stats needed to pass the bot checker's theshold?
I'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.
The issue for GH isn’t your PR spam. It’s all the other operations before your PR spam ever arrives.
Sounds kind of weird that the blog post complains about `poisoning the conversation with pointless "implementation plans"` when literally they ask for that, after attaching $900 USD bounty to a very under-specified issue, and even replies with "Do you have an implementation plan in mind?" to some of the first "attempters". Sounds like they got exactly what they'd been asking for, and even before LLMs if you pulled something similar, the effects would have been similar.
It's fine for developers to provide a plan, even if it gets rejected. The problem comes when every script kiddie figures AI has made them into a developer.
Imagine you want to get a doctor's opinion, or maybe a couple of opinions. But a zillion AI-amateurs have registered themselves as doctors. How do you separate wheat from the chaff?
> Imagine you want to get a doctor's opinion, or maybe a couple of opinions. But a zillion AI-amateurs have registered themselves as doctors. How do you separate wheat from the chaff?
Right, but that's not what happened though.
Someone went to the public square, said "Hey, I'm looking for any sort of doctor, and I'll pay you $900 if you tell me your plan and then whatever plan I chose wins" and then they get surprised they get flooded by zillion AI-amateurs.
You don't generate a ton of chaff then try to find the wheat, you ensure your process doesn't generate a ton of chaff in the first place. Offering large monetary rewards for relatively simple work for anyone in the public is bound to generate a ton of chaff...
This is great example of the toxic effect money has on open source. Reward people with respect and recognition instead. Weird anonymous accounts no one's ever heard of will leave, because someone (or something) who's concealing their identity has nothing to gain from recognition. Honestly GitHub should have a real names policy. Because if you're not Satoshi Nakamoto then there's only three reasons I can think of to be anonymous on GitHub: (1) to avoid obtaining your employer's authorization, (2) to spam, harass, and engage in toxic behaviors, or (3) you're not even human. All three of these are the last things I want when engaging on the GitHub platform. Don't get me wrong, I love robots. But I'm perfectly capable of talking to the robot on my own. I don't want to talk to your robot. I also don't want people slipping me intellectual property below the board without their employer's consent. And I certainly don't enjoy all the hate and harassment. GitHub has tried to help with the last part, by making overt displays of hate something that can get you in trouble. The issue is that people just get more guilesome with more anonymous accounts, because the issue was never disrespect (which can actually be strategic and pro-social if we look at Torvalds' career), but rather bad faith participation. If GitHub can guarantee that all its users are human real names good faith actors, then we might be able to start talking about open bounties.
I like how they are taking a stand against vanity metrics. Rare to see that these days
My first thought after reading the blog was, let me share the blog with Claude and ask it how bots can circumvent this.
imo AI bots have significantly affected OSS and we need better qualitative measures to define success
AI company annoyed by AI ... Surprise
'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, the funds can be used to hire someone specifically for triage.
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 better option. More often the latter is just a variant of the sunk cost fallacy and your ego. Reality is (un)surprisingly complex and solutions aren't usually trivial
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
Then people from a sanctioned countries are blocked from open source, or worse, you have to explain to the bank and/or the government why you sent 20USD to someone in Venezuela.
And here we have another specimen of "things which crypto are actually useful" spotted in the wild!
I think the intersection of the set of people able and interested in contributing and those who are willing to figure out cryptocurrencies is the empty set.
I quick visit to https://gitcoin.co/campaigns will show you that you are wrong. Hundreds of projects funded by even more people.
Mind you: that's on one of the most convulated ways there is to get involved, because it involves a bunch of smart contract operations and on-chain voting. If we are talking about crypto only as a payment network, things are even simpler.
It's cheating if the projects using it are cryptocurrency related :)
A generic python library used by generic people who have no interest in this field is something else.
Coinbase reports more than 100+ user accounts worldwide. Kraken has ~10M.
Also, we are talking about people who are tech-savvy enough to be interested in participating in a FOSS project. Opening an account at an exchange is not rocket science.
No, getting the money out of an exchange if you are in a country USA doesn't like is rocket science. Which was the whole point of using crypto rather than money.
The exchanges are for the people that can send the money, not receive it.
And those who are living in countries the USA doesn't like will probably have no issue to learn how to work with crypto. Of all the complex things they need to do to work around the restrictions, setting up a wallet barely registers.
This is exactly the strategy that the owner of the SomethingAwful forum used in 2004 to get rid of bots and assholes. (I used to remember his name, kinda famous, oh well).
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.
I have 3 PRs on https://github.com/django-oauth/django-oauth-toolkit/pulls that haven't been merged for OVER AN YEAR due to the maintaners being overloaded and who are expected to work on this for free. The fact that these PRs are not being promptly reviewed have cost me at least 3000€ in potential grant work.
If I was told that I could make a deposit of $10 to get less stressed maintainers and a faster PR review cycle, I wouldn't even blink. I wouldn't even ask for the money back.
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]".
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I know it's against convention to comment on downvotes, but really? Really? This is controversial? The OP came up with an elegant solution that cleanly solved their problem without subjecting contributors to anything more than a captcha. Then somebody comes along and says "oh, it's so easy, just charge $10". You're going to set up payment infrastructure, incur administrative overhead with human support managing refunds, and deter 99% of actual humans from contributing, and then call that the easy solution that OP is so stupid for not thinking of first? Give me a fucking break. This site really is just Reddit-lite, anyone who thinks about engineering problems seriously would realise this does not stand up as anything beyond a pithy internet solution with three seconds of thought into what actually implementing it would entail.
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 by people with a stake in actually solving the problem
Let me flip your argument: think of how much time and thought is poured into problems like this one by people who don't even try to implement a Pfand system beforehand.
> 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.
> significant anti-human friction
Yes, that friction is intentional. The lazy people don't want to do it? Great, there is very little chance their contributions are worthwhile. The privacy conscious people won't do it? Then let them work on their own repositories and complain loudly about the idiot maintainer who puts these insane barriers. Then the maintainer can go take a look at that forks done by the loud complainers and see if it is worth to whitelist them.
> it's why products/services that offer free trials or a free tier tend to be overwhelmingly more successful
Drug dealers also offer the first hit for free, why don't you use that as an example as well? ;)
To answer this properly in case the quip was too vague: there is no reason for "number of PRs opened by new contributors" to be a viable/interesting KPI for any FOSS project.
> I'll take the captcha, thanks.
First you need to show me all your cool FOSS projects.
How is it "laziness" to not want to pay $10 to submit a bug fix to your repository?
1) I just used the term lazy because that's what OP use.
2) You are not "paying" $10. The money would be returned to you. In case you haven't heard of Pfand systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
I semi-regularly offer drive-by PRs to projects I like and use. They're real PRs, not generated with AI. They range from papercuts to doc fixes to attempts to add that one feature that I want. Sometimes it's a drive-by group of PRs. Or an issue and a PR. I try to conform to what the maintainers prefer.
Unless I knew the maintainers personally, this would prevent most of my contributions, which are most often accepted. Maybe it's worth losing out on my small contributions to avoid slop. But things would absolutely be lost this way.
Agreed... However there's not a good IsThisAnAI() test at present. So unfortunately, we will have to use anti-spammer techniques (because that is exactly what AI is, high(er) quality spam).
Yeah, because we'd hate to allow people from poor countries to contribute to FOSS projects, right?
Or teenagers without full access to online banking.
Or the unemployed.
Oh, give me a break. No one is taking the ability from others to fork the repo. If these exceptional cases really were to happen, how fast would it be for someone else to notice and do one of (a) notify the maintainers to get this particular user whitelisted or (b) front the entry costs?
Sounds like bandaids on top of bandaids, at which point you start to wonder if the idea is fundamentally broken.
Why should I trust you to give me my deposit back?
Because the cost in reputation is not high enough to justify a large scale scam operation?
If you don't trust the maintainer, you can always fork a repo and let them merge on their own.
$10 to a Silicon Valley software engineer reading this comment may feel like... $(a lot?)... to a range of other would-be contributors (thinking of $6/day minimum wages in some places, for example)
Wonder if a dollar would work for now until more people give bots credit cards.
Easily? You think the kind of people who think it makes sense to make bogus slop PRs are going to react reasonably to overburdened volunteer maintainers refusing to give them their US$10 back?
Yes. Once a PR is rejected, contact from that bot is blocked. No appeals.
This is never going to work. Sufficiently many of these people are going to find maintainers' home addresses and send them death threats and the likes. If you see how badly some people flip out just because their PR is rejected, it's going to be much much worse if their PR is rejected and their money is taken.
Ok. If I'm the maintainer receiving death threats over that, I'd tell them they would get the $10 dollars back, plus some extra money for their troubles.
Location of the envelope with the money: the same police station where I'd reported the death threats.
The worst case is that someone loses out on $10, no? How does this work if the maintainer is the swindler?
I don't think that is a (very realistic) concern. AI is slop, the problem is not that the real contributors are struggling to get PRs merged.
The bigger issue being, raising the bar to students who may have otherwise had productive careers (but education is a general issue, where the students don't even yet recognize they are being scammed).
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.
> What is bot logic exactly?
Ill thought out logic like your own. I think you are likely a bot at this point.
It's not likely, because that's not something that people are likely to do. Only a bot like yourself with a poor model of the world will do this type of thing. It will be amusing to see the AI bots trying to run the scam you are describing and then nobody will contribute to the fake projects... except other fake AI contributors.