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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

Somebody submitted a PR to a JavaScript/glsl game of mine last night (https://github.com/westoncb/under-game), adding a badge/link that would open the repo on repl.it.

I looked around at the user's activity a bit and they had sent essentially the same PR to at least one other repo recently, and appeared to be affiliated with repl.it.

I went ahead and merged the PR since it does just seem like a small net positive addition.

I still wonder though: what downside to this might I be missing?

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Yep, I got the same thing. Haven't merged it and probably won't. Since it appeared to be a bot that created the PR, it seemed like a rather underhanded, spammy way of promoting the repl.it project. It kinda reminds me of the whole tip4commit debacle with the flask project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969

We're certainly not operating any bots if that's what you're implying.

The PR's commit message said that the commit was "automatically generated on repl.it". I guess I don't know how to interpret that. Maybe I'm mistaken and someone did manually created the PR with a bad commit message: https://github.com/davesque/go.py/pull/2

And I did eventually confirm that the commit was, in fact, created manually by an actual person and not a bot.

I looked up the PR author and it's a repl.it user and community moderator (https://repl.it/@eankeen).

Anyways, I hope the PRs are not annoying -- it certainly cool to be able to run under game quickly (I scored 97 https://imgur.com/a/HHMMXAY)

It's not necessarily an issue—I am for now happy to have the badge/link on my repo.

I would have been less suspicious if the messaging had been more straightforward (e.g. "Hey, we're seeing if some projects we like would be interested in adding a repl.it badge to their READMEs."). As it was, the PR initially sounded like something personalized, directed toward me—but then I go and find the exact message being sent to others, which activates my suspicion.

i send that pr - definitely didn't mean to miscommunication intent or arouse suspicion. thanks for actually saying that, since i'm never really sure myself that my words are good in their context

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