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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Most projects should have a readme and most readme's on github should have a constributing section that everyone hopefully reads before creating a PR. Failing to do so tbh means that person probably failed to comply with coding standards or whatever else is in there. It's just as likely to have the PR closed for those reasons as for the reason "No PR's please".

That said, I agree with the idea of simply removing the possibility to make external PR's. The possibility to view (internal) PR's must be there though, so that external viewers can see PRs from the mainainer(s).

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You can't enforce a readme. If it says "PRs are not accepted", and you create a pull request template that says "please be aware your PR will get closed automatically", folks will still file PRs in the hopes that their work is special enough to consider, and they still get their hopes crushed when that their PR gets closed without ever having been looked at.

If someone either willfully or through purposeful negligence both doesn’t read a README or PR template that outline PRs aren’t welcome and submits a PR hoping against hope for a different outcome, I think we can assume that absolutely nothing will prevent them from having their hopes crushed.

I don’t think optimizing for that edge case makes a ton of sense. Having the ability to hide PRs might be a nice feature, but some people use that for stuff other than straight pull requests.

Then maybe those folks should get a better feature for that, too. More than one thing can be suboptimal about the same feature-as-implemented.

Totally valid, and I'm not opposed to an option to turn it off, I was just saying I can understand why some people might need to keep it on, even if they do have a README and PR template that makes it clear they don't accept PRs. I just think the "crushing the hopes of people that don't read" aspect is probably the lowest priority in that sort of situation.

That's not the only thing.

A few of those who didn't read the README, and get their PRs auto closed, might get upset at the maintainers, and write something a bit angry, making it less pleasant to be a maintainer.

It's not just about that, though. I want to avoid crushing people's hopes, yes, but in the event that they are absolutely set on submitting a PR, I don't want to have to deal with getting a notification and having to manually close it. (And no, I don't want to take the time to set up a bot to do it either. I have better things to do with my time.)

I mean, I get that, and I'm not opposed to having a method to turn off PRs. I'm just saying that if the impetus is avoiding crushing people's hopes because a README and template isn't clear enough, I think there are people that will still create an issue or send an email about why they can't submit a PR.

Enforcing the readme is simply closing/ignoring the PR's.

You can easily do that, but what you can't do is prevent people from being angry. You can do everything in your power to prevent people from accidentally wasting their time, and you should. This is where "hide the feature" would come in.

If there is one constant on the internet, it's that people don't read. You can say whatever you like, there will be tons of people who brush past it and just go and send PRs anyway.

Then let them learn their lesson. The thing is I have done stupid shit due to carelessness, but I’m not so entitled to blame it on someone else. If a potential source code contributor cannot read the contributing guidelines AT ALL that is on them, lesson learned. Really fuck em if they’re gonna stay butt hurt about it.. this should have been cleared up in kindergarten.

Some of them might get upset at the maintainers tough, and write something a bit angry, making it less pleasant to be a maintainer

> Really fuck em if they’re gonna stay butt hurt about it.. this should have been cleared up in kindergarten.

Such an attitude from a maintainer can piss people of and make them write angry things to the maintainer, causing him/her to quit.

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