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silverwindyesterday at 3:52 PM7 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

microtonalyesterday at 4:17 PM

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.

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hiccuphippoyesterday at 4:01 PM

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

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marginalxyesterday at 3:58 PM

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.

avs733today at 4:26 AM

It seems like some better basic metrics should be made front and center with PRs in this day and age. Yes AI is the driving force behind the current crop of problems but there are other issues. Yes it’s accessible if you go look but the point is people don’t have time.

the rate of comits/PRs total

The rate of PRs to repos they don’t own

The reject rate of PRs

The number of ban

An estimated “AI” or bot score or status flag

There are a few better attempts at GitHub metrics calculators but I have not seen any that move beyond the paradigm of more vomits is default assumed good. It’s time to foreground quality not just quantity. The GitHub “4 kpis” are entirely action oriented.

godelskitoday at 3:23 AM

I've gotten tons of spam on repos that were purely ml research code. Things I saw copy pasted over hundreds of repos.

  > Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.
It's so bad I'd be okay with a lower bar where it's flagged if they're posting the same message over multiple repos... FFS they aren't even stopping this shit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964617
cdrnsfyesterday at 4:07 PM

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

moraescyesterday at 9:03 PM

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