Unsolicited GitHub

[ichabod801]

I have some GitHub repositories, and as some of you probably noticed, I've put a lot of work into the t_games one. So I got a pull request from someone I never heard of saying he fixed some typos in the readme. He did change one typo, and changed one word to a synonym. Then he added in some "badges," some of which were wrong (are badges at all important on GitHub?).

One of the badges was "all contributors" which I found more info on here. It says:

People are giving themselves and their free time to contribute to open source projects in so many ways, so we believe everyone should be praised for their contributions (code or not).

In general I don't have a problem giving credit where credit is due. I put an extensive credit list in the t_games interface for that purpose. But this just seems to catch GitHub contributors, and not all of my contributors are on GitHub.

I just use GitHub for my narrow little purposes, and I don't really have a clue about the broader community or whatever. But this just smells like some guy who wants to get his name as a contributor on as many projects as possible, and force people to give him credit by dragging them into this "all contributors" thing. Is that a fair assessment, or am I missing something?

[perfringo]

This is fair assessment.

[metulburr]

It sounds like someone trying to increase their github status quo by finding any possible means to push something to any repo. Maybe for job interviews? Fixing typos and changing words to synonyms in my book does not justify giving credit. I think of a contributor when someone fixes a code issue, adds code, or posts comments that ends up significantly altering the program.

[Gribouillis]

I think of a contributor when someone fixes a code issue, adds code, or posts comments that ends up significantly altering the program.

One day I wrote a mail to the GNU Texmacs developers, suggesting them to add a command line option to convert a texmacs file to pdf without opening the program. Because of this, they added me to the (long) list of contributors to GNU Texmacs! That was almost 20 years ago.

[ichabod801]

Thanks, guys. I'm going to critique his pull and reject it. But here's the funny thing: if all he had done was correct the typo, I probably would have accepted it and given him credit.

[ichabod801]

Well what do you know. After I closed the pull request, he came back with an actual bug report. Now he'll get play testing credit, at least.

[buran]

did he send an e-mail in advance (like you ask) that they want to contribute

[ichabod801]

No, but that's meant to be a request, not a requirement. And it was based on optimistic projects of how many people would want to play test.