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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

I was contributing to more popular projects, between 2.5k to 4k stars on GH, I just gave up and stopped doing it for free when users just open issues like 'I requested this feature 5 months ago and it's still not implemented. what are you waiting for?', after reading 8th of such issues in 3 projects I just left all of them the same day and started working on my commercial project. Working on OSS where every idiot can open an issue for free and complain or think we're their slaves if waste of time and energy. Never. again. The worst were users or forkers who asked me to change license of a project from MIT to GPL because they would like it more... eh.

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A maintainer of an open source project, or really anyone who has a public-facing role online, needs to develop a thick skin and be able to ignore griefers and trolls. Ask anyone who works retail or customer support how horrible people can be. Now multiply that by 10 for people online.

A pretty good example of this is the recent opening of Fallout 4 mods to Xbox users- almost overnight mod makers were spammed pretty much everywhere with demands to stick it on xbox, do this, do that, etc. Lots of bad blood.

Can always close as WONTFIX - reopen if you have a pull request in the first case ... and just WONTFIX the license changers.

Did it once. Closed an issue I couldn't reproduce and author didn't want to show me their code. I got blamed for not helping them and not fixing problems in my code :) I stopped responding to such issues at all.

I maintain Cachet [1] which has 4.4k stars on it. I've closed several issues in a similar vein, only to be ranted at for not giving a reason. I shouldn't have to explain the same reason for the fifth time when you could've searched for it already — but hey, I appreciate the thoughts.

[1] https://github.com/Cachethq/Cachet

Would it help creating a page with "common reasons for closing" and adding a note with a link to that page?

More work to avoid more work?

Can't you just lock the thread?

My experience, having locked a thread exactly once after triaging several thousand reports on TypeScript, is that you immediately get another bug from the same person complaining about how dare you lock an issue.

The solution for that is to ban the person.

I've gotten that a few times too - sometimes the issue opener turns out to have been right.

I think more people need to do better at communicating better is what it comes down to.

Maybe the solution is to use an issue tracker outside of GitHub. It seems like a lot of these problems come from how easy it is to make drive-by comments without really being involved in the project's community.

I moved to GitLab where I can disable issues completely or allow only specific people opening issues[1], unfortunately most projects are on GitHub. It also discourages lazy (who are usually useless) reporters from opening the issues, as they would have to create new account, 2:0 for me.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/perm...

Altassian JIRA (cloud or self-hosted) is free for Open Source projects. You can add as many required fields as you want and make creating issues as complicated as necessary :)

This actually makes me wonder if open source is the right thing for many projects.

For a project that other engineers will use it seems to make sense. Other engineers (or some percentage of them) can contribute.

But certain projects really target non-engineering types. I don't mean that in any judgmental way. Only trying to distinguish between those who will need a ton of hand holding and are unlikely to contribute back and those the have a higher percentage of contributing directly back the the project.

Off the top of my head the creative coding community is full of artists who've learned just enough code to be able to glue things together and make cool art but not enough to contribute to the things they are gluing together. They generally fit the profile of "starving artist" or student.

The game dev community is also going that direction because several projects have made it simpler to be able to create a game with very little programming skills.

I'm not sure what my point is other than if you make one of those types of projects you're going to get pleads for help from people that probably can't construct a pull request. Not sure how to fix that.

> This actually makes me wonder if open source is the right thing for many projects.

This is why the term "open source" is confusing, and I'm annoyed when people use it. If you're referring to software freedom, free software is necessary for a free society. If you're referring to the bazaar model of development, then I agree that some projects don't need to work that way. What's important in free software is that there can be a community of users, but it doesn't matter if the original developers decide to be part of that community.

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