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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

No, I think it's fair to work backward: GitHub doesn't offer a way to disable PRs, the service is explicitly 'social coding', therefore those using it should not be disgruntled about PRs showing up.

The healthy maintainer-side attitude is that these impose no obligation whatsoever to review, apply, or even look at, the fork in question.

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GitHub is indeed a platform that can be used for social coding, and it is also a service that encourages the use of contribution guidelines. If the maintainer asks you to open an issue to discuss your contribution before submitting a pull request, you are expected to follow their wishes.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-proje...

Which of course I do.

The emotional side of the burden of closing PRs which don't follow guidelines is the part which can be set aside. It's just a bit of housecleaning, it's seldom done from malice, English is not everyone's first language, etc.

Getting upset that a mechanism which exists and won't change gets used is not healthy.

The issue wasn't an occasional mistake done in good faith. The commenter has decided to explicitly dismiss contribution guidelines, and for that the healthy response is to call out their lack of respect for the time of open source maintainers. The focus wasn't on emotional burden either, it can simply take a lot of time to sort out issues and pull requests that do not follow contribution guidelines when you maintain a popular project. It isn't a bit of house cleaning, but hours wasted every week, depending on the project.

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