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Comment by taleinat | Hacker News Reader

For a specific doc fix, a PR is indeed the way to go. If it's not a simple fix, creating an issue on the tracker may also be called for. Doing so does help and is appreciated, even if it sometimes takes a long time to be addressed by a core dev.

Otherwise, one could help in ways like I mentioned previously: reading existing issues, checking if they are still relevant and commenting accordingly, reviewing PRs and patches, etc.

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> For a specific doc fix, a PR is indeed the way to go. If it's not a simple fix, creating an issue on the tracker may also be called for.

That is precisely what I did. As noted, there has been no indication (by activity on the issue or PR) that having filed these helped or is appreciated. Hence discouragement.

It is one of the hard lessons of open source maintainership that, without providing feedback to contributors, there is no demonstration of the project's appreciation. Therefore new contributors will (correctly!) conclude that the project does not appreciate these efforts.

I think the key point that you are making is that projects which need more help should place higher priorities on working through PR and issue backlogs as those are a primary way to taking people who are willing to help and converting them into more dedicated and integrated maintainers. Letting those backlogs languish because you don't have enough volunteers becomes a self a reinforcing cycle that becomes harder and harder to break out of.

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