In my main project we added a new requirement that all new contributors meet a maintainer in a non-textual format before their first PR is merged. Seems to work well for a small project.
Only if you have maintainers everywhere. I live in a small city in the middle of the US - how far is it to a maintainer? 4 hours to Kansas City, or fly to San Francisco? Either way the burden seems far too high.
I contribute to OSS substantially and my GitHub project has 150000 active users (users, not stars). Yet, I would not call you up just to send a PR to your project.
It's sad that it has come to this and to me it just means OSS is dead.
I'd be really happy to come across this in a project I were interested in. So much hobby OSS is infested with slop that I don't even want to skim the code if I pick up a hint that there's no humans at the wheel.
What an elegantly common sense solution. It's also probably a really good way to make contacts with interesting people.
i do a lighter version on a small repo. first-time contributors get a "what problem were you hitting?" question before i look at the diff. genuine ones answer in two sentences. the spam PRs either go silent or paste back something that doesn't match their own changes and too long. even those with em dash terminator are still easy to spot. it costs 30 seconds and filters almost everything. a proper profile is also a must. i mean, we can all spot fake facebook pages. i believe we can spot auto generated github profiles. and if their bot is actually good? why not? fix