Rejected GitHub profile achievements | Hacker News Reader

Rejected GitHub profile achievements

github.com

544 pointskelseyfrog133 comments

Suggested:

"The Artist": posted a screenshot of a terminal instead of copy and pasting the text

"The Filmmaker": posted an animated GIF of their terminal session instead of writing out what they did

Maintainers _love_ artists and filmmakers!

"The Novelist": Opens an issue or replies to a thread with only the words "doesn't work" with no indication of what they tried, how they know it doesn't work, or any error messages.

"Captain Obvious": Opens a very aggressive and angry issue about the project not installing, when the maintainer responds to double-check that you didn't miss a critical and well-documented note in the docs, you disappear, never to reply again.

I'd call that first one "The Hemingway Award For Terminal Concision In Fault Diagnosis"

There's a legitimate reason for posting low information issues - finding out if it's a known limitation or issue (that didn't come up in a search) before putting in extra effort to document something that's already been documented and discussed elsewhere. Maybe not "doesn't work" (two words) exactly, but "This doesn't work for me with the X234 hardware" (... with an implied "is this expected?").

It's very common for people new to projects or with limited technical skills to assume that the problems they face are common/well known or that other people know much more than them.

The frustration responders face is due to the mismatch of assumptions, if the issue is in fact not common or well known, but IMO a simple "I haven't seen that before, please post full diagnostics" is an easy and reasonable boilerplate response.

> "This doesn't work for me with the X234 hardware"

The problem with that phrase is that you didn't state what is not working. I don't expect - although highly welcome - a complete diagnostics from the reporter, but please at least write the steps to reproduce your issue.

Yes. “Install failed with permissions error” or “runs but doesn’t seem to be listening on configured port” at least.

> "The Novelist": Opens an issue or replies to a thread with only the words "doesn't work" with no indication of what they tried, how they know it doesn't work, or any error messages.

"The Shrug Reporter" might be a better name [0]

[0] https://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/definitions-s/shr...

Along these lines:

"The Art Critic": posted a screenshot of a diff containing a suggested code change instead of sending a PR

I've actually done something like this exactly once when I was much newer to GitHub and git (and probably wanted to save some of my time).

> a screenshot of a terminal instead of copy and pasting the text

No. Please, no!

For some reason, I get screenshots of text regularly from technical people. Log files, error messages, everything. It is like they forget Slack can send anything more than images and emojis.

No, I'm not typing out keywords from 3 pages of Java exception, nor am I typing an encoded AWS authorization message.

Is there a tool that lets you can paste in a screenshot and have it extract the text?

MacOS does this pretty automatically across multiple apps.

I've tried using it for this exact thing, and it doesn't work that well with terminal screenshots. You have to carefully read the output and fix it manually, but at least it's better than typing it all out by hand.

What do you mean, MacOS? I use a Mac and have no idea how to do this.

On Windows, as part of PowerToys - there is a Text extractor. Works just like the screenshot tool except dumps text to clipboard https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/powertoys/text-ext...

Yes, but in the case of the authorization message it was cut off.

It isn’t just one thing that goes wrong with my team members.

Pipe the output of the angular gyrus to the supramarginal gyrus.

> "The Filmmaker": posted an animated GIF of their terminal session instead of writing out what they did

I love videos and GIFs when trying to debug something. They're usually much better at catching small details than people's descriptions. Very often, the bug will hinge on an action that you can do in multiple ways, or some action that the user took directly before triggering the bug that they don't realise is necessarily part of the problem. Or maybe the bug only triggers on certain screen sizes or something, or if certain terminal colours are used, or if the user is using a touchscreen or something.

Having a video makes it a lot easier to notice these sorts of things. It's not always perfect, and a detailed description alongside the video is best, especially if you also have any errors or important text copied there so I can copy it myself, but given the choice, I often prefer video over text.

So yes, I genuinely love filmmakers in this context. Send me screenshots, send me videos!

Videos are good as long as you also provide copyable content. Gifs not so much since I can’t pause.

mpv will also play gifs and allow you to pause them. It also knows how to stream web resources.

I have a keyboard shortcut bound to run mpv with the content of the clipboard, so right click on gif, "Copy Image Link", hit the keyboard shortcut and wait for the gif to open in mpv where I can pause, speed up, speed down, scroll etc.

Also useful for any video or audio on the web, since mpv is (for me) much nicer than any built-in player.

I don't think it works with images, but I get a lot of use out of this browser extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/

Specifically for running MPV with URL-links/video sources/iframe sources as an argument.

"The problem solver": asks how to solve a specific error while also posting the stacktrace/error which already contains a message about how to solve the error

“Readme, Readme-not”: opens an issue asking how to do something explicitly covered in the readme/getting started.

I love this one. We’ve all missed something plain as day at some point. I pride myself on RTFM before I start working with something, but I’ve earned this medal a few times.

Can we also start handing out achievements to repos and/or orgs?

I have a few where “Clear As Molasses” is a good one for the README: “Documents something useful in an entirely opaque manner.” (Edit: Maybe requiring you read the code to understand what the README failed to articulate about something basic?)

Edit: typo

"not helping": posting low-effort comments that don't help with anything

"Internet famous": your repo had a bug so severe you got news articles written about it.

Both were from thinking about https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue... …

And it is no surprise that the behaviour of The Artists clashes with expectations of people that rely on accessibility. It is very telling if I read a blog where the content is about terminal stuff, and each and every example is a plain image. Unfortunately, this is spreading.

“Wikipedian”: reverted a commit within 10 minutes of it being pushed to main.

“Social distancer”: submitted a commit that just adds spacing.

“Edgycat”: contributed or suggested a badge for this repo (I’m earning this badge right now!).

“Duct tape”: sent three commits in a row that contain text “fix tests”

"Rust Evangelist": creates issue suggesting moving project to Rust

on five different projects

"Angry Karen" - posts entitled, aggressive comments to open-source authors, possibly demands money back for wasted time

The social Justice Warrior: demands the project stop using some terminology they deem "problematic" while already having forked the project with a new name, just in case maintainers don't comply within 15 minutes.

"Fake Profile": recently created account with fake activity likely for the purpose of landing multiple full-time remote jobs

Even better when the Terminal has a funky background image making the text hard to read. I've seen that in some questions on Ask Ubuntu.

"Unpopular opinion": (devil-emoji) Over 100 thumbs-down-emoji on any comment you've posted in an issue

"I will raise with the team": (im-hiding-gif) An issue or PR with over 100 thumbs-up-emoji that has been open for over a year

"For legal reasons": (judge-emoji) A PR was opened with a fix to an issue, but because the CYA was not signed, the PR was auto-closed

"Business Model Blues": (bars-over-source-code-emoji) A License file has over 50% of its text changed

"Back from the dead": (zombie-emoji) You comment on an issue or PR that was opened over a year ago

Honestly the "This is fine"-badge for over 1.000 open issues on public repositories is very necessary.

There are so many opensource-projects now as compared to 10 years ago, especially in JavaScript-land, which have an unbelievable number of open bugs.

This is terrible because the majority of these bugs seem to be low-quality, so even if you are a seasoned developer with contribution experience, opening up a bug with the incentive to help simply gets you ignored.

I'm waiting for a bug in next.js at the moment where 404 does not return 404, that has been open for months (https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/51021). I don't have the time of writing a PR, but I have written countless PRs and bug-reports and worked on many other open-source projects, so I think I have done my share.

It is elitist, but I wish there was a way for maintainers to sort bugs by the reputation of the reporter, so projects can prioritize high-quality issues.

It's "1000 open issues on public repositories you own", not "1000 open issues created by you on public repositories". Both would be interesting, though.

I don't understand your comment.

Who would be able to open a 1000 issues? Are you referring to trolls?

Yeah, if only there was some way for people to exchange value... Like, you know, paid licenses, support tiers, something that Ancient Romans called running a business. /s

But no, everything must be free, and then shock-and-surprize: open issues are piling up and nobody wants to deal with them.

Open source software and GitHub existed 10 years ago, and what I said was that either the quality of issues or the quality of software decreased.

You are saying people have less time for their projects now as compared to 10 years ago.

“The thief”: When your approach to open source is that you close pull requests and merge the diff manually under your own name.

So many large corporate-run projects do this and, while I’m sure there are some compliance reasons, it just looks dodgy.

> So many large corporate-run projects do this ...

Ouch, that's pretty bad. Any stand out projects doing this that you'd care to mention?

duosecurity/duo_universal_php did this with my PR.

Interesting. That doesn't seem like a complete clear cut case of it though, more the git-fu of the repo maintainer there might not be all that great. :(

Saying that from looking at your PR:

https://github.com/duosecurity/duo_universal_php/pull/7

Then looking at the commit which eventually got into their repo:

https://github.com/duosecurity/duo_universal_php/commit/c69e...

Even though they fucked up the author name on the commit itself, they at least attempted to credit you in the commit title:

    Merge PR 7 from theodorejb; Add missing type declarations and fix incorrect PHPDoc types

While that's not fantastic as it screws up proper attribution with pretty much every automated git tool... it doesn't seem like a case of them trying to claim credit for someone else's work.

That's just my impression anyway. Could be wrong. :D

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/2292#issuec... became https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/commit/125a81f2e... for some inexplicable reason. Now it looks like droidmonkey authored that entire feature. I did see the "squashed commits" and "taken under my wing" part but it appears it was a `git add .` and not a `git rebase` type operation that would have preserved the original author separate from the committer

I mean in the end I'm not jammed up about it because my objective was to contribute back the local patches I made to scratch my itch, but it means I have to remember the PR number because that's the only evidence of my authorship

Disappointed not to see my own personal favourite, at least 50 issues raised for feature requests with no other contributions.

achievement name: "I'm more of an idea person" or perhaps "chop-chop"

Blue-Sky Thinking

“Product owner”

What about one for "I made 10 contributions that have been sitting unreviewed for more than a year"?

for normal user this is the only way to contact author.

I agree with you and don't necessarily think this is "bad," but GitHub probably isn't the best place to just dump a ton of feature requests. And if that's the only easy way to contact the author, there's always a decent chance that's a deliberate choice.

> GitHub probably isn't the best place to just dump a ton of feature requests

Isn't this the entire point of having a feature request tag for issues?

I just meant in the "do this thing for me" (x100) way. Surely there's a more meaningful way to interact as a user, even a non-technical one.

It lets devs easily ignore feature requests most of the time.

This is not in a cynical way it's just likely not urgent.

I wanted to indicate this is why there are so many accounts don't do any contribution.

“Architecture Astronaut“

Nah that one should go to the user who proposes massive and sweeping architectural changes, complete with diagrams and over engineering in every facet-regardless of whether the project needs it, but never makes any attempt to do it.

„Idea guy“

I've earned "patient skeleton" twice.

The real shocker: one of those was merged after the two year mark. There wasn't any back-and-forth about the PR or anything like that, either. It was a low-activity project, and it had gone unnoticed. I had given up and pointed my `requirements.txt` at my own fork.

Someone else filed an issue about the same problem my long-pending PR fixed, I replied to that issue saying that would fix it, and that activity finally got it noticed.

The other one is still pending.

The amount of uncaptured value in forked projects containing one vital change, unmerged into mainline, is easily in the billions of dollars.

I maintained a fork of a project for a while where I just grabbed all useful PRs from the "network" tab of the original repo and merged them / resolved conflicts. Fortunately at some point it was joined back to the original repo, but... yes, there's definitely a lot of similar opportunities.

There's a Firefox extension called something like "lovely forks" that shows the most starred fork for every repo on github. I find it useful for finding these kind of forks.

It’s very odd you can’t sort forks by the number of stars in the UI

I propose "YOLO" - ignored Dependabot notifications for more than 3 months.

That award has my name all over it.

There’s already a real achievement called YOLO: “Merged own pull request without code review”.

Full list of real achievements here: https://github.com/Schweinepriester/github-profile-achieveme...

Damn. Well then, "The Undependables” it is.

Clarification: none of these were achievements rejected by GitHub, simply humorous ideas from a developer known as "flet" with no affiliation to GitHub.

Congrats on earning the Captain Obvious achievement!

Not very obvious considering some of the comments in this thread.

Some people are reading the title of the post as if GitHub had received proposals from their employees to include some of these achivements into the final feature set, and then decided to reject them, but the reality is that none of them were proposed by any GitHub employee at all. They are all “joke submissions” from the development community, making fun of the gamification of the platform.

Congrats on earning the "Adding Value" achievement:

Pointing out something obvious, then having someone else point out that what you pointed out is obvious, then defending the obvious thing that you pointed out by stating that it in fact is not obvious

I propose the "Copium" achievement when you star your own repository.

Narcissist might be a bit more appropriate

at first I thought of "the stranger" but maybe a bit on the nose.

"The Stranger" would be starring your project from your alternate Github account.

When working alone remotely from home, I simulate pair programming with a methodology I call "The Stranger". I sit on one of my hands until it becomes numb and tingly, and then it feels like somebody else is typing and moving the mouse!

I don't remember for sure, but I'm pretty sure that GitHub used to automatically star your repos when you created them.

“Type O Contributor” - have your only contributions be minor spelling and grammar fixes.

Typo-O donor.

I've been known to do this from time to time. Are such contributions unwelcome?

Depends on the project, but I've contributed to a few big-name projects (podman being the latest) where I found a typo in their documentation, and they happily accepted it. I did talk to them in their IRC channel first, so YMMV.

This couldn’t be an achievement, because it can be taken away.

Suggested: Achievement for excessively locking conversations[1]

[1] https://github.com/Flet/rejected-github-profile-achievements...

"Fresh Freak": employ a stalebot that has repeatedly closed an issue despite users trying to keep it open with bump comments

I get that Kubernetes is a hugely popular repo, and they obviously have lots of issues opened frequently, but my god, the stale-bot they have in that repo is the worst for that.

Gitlab also. It's a great way to externalise your prioritisation process, but if they have product managers they should probably be manually closing/deprioritising issues.

How about a “Stasis Award” - Tag 1,000 issues as “Won’t Fix”

"The Grandfather": you made your account in 2008 with a rage comic era meme handle and no associated email address and now it's completely broken and trashed by backward incompatibility bugs from all of the upgrades and changes and acquisitions made by github corporate and its various owners

There are quite a lot of patient skeletons out there. What does it even take to get AWS to review a botocore PR?

"Lone Wolf": merge 1000 of your own PRs

"Deadbeat": open at least 100 PRs in other people's repositories, without taking any action on comments or reviews

i like the lone wolf, but without the PR just a repo with commits only by me.

“The Dishwasher” - Fork 10 repositories without making any additional commits.

There’s gotta be a better name for this one, but I couldn’t come up with it.

I dunno if this applies to every case but I'll point out that doing that preserves the repo at a point in time from deletion but using GitHub's disk space, which is why there's a storm of them for any socially problematic repo. I'm aware the DMCA takedowns can easily target the forks but it's easy to take your chances

Isn't taking out the forks as well pretty much standard?

So you have to clone the repo (forked or not) somewhere instead for it to be effective.

"Archivist"?

The Optimist

I like it

Collector of Cutlery?

To be honest, I want some of these on my profile. I, for a fact, am guilty of many of them. Everyone is.

I love this, however...

I would say the "thumbs up" on a comment is one of the most helpful things on Github, it telegraphs that a comments is usually the fix for something, if we didn't have loads of people doing the "thumbs up" reaction on comments, we wouldn't effectively have stack overflow style answers in comments.

I think the badge isn't for the reaction, but for posting comments whose text is solely "+1" or "<thumbs up emoji>"

Oooo I see, well in that case... badge away!

Side note - it would be if Github squished all of those down into reactions and next to the reaction added a line saying "we squished the following comments to reactions (show squished comments)".

No pun intended there with the word squish.

YouTrack kind of has support for that https://www.jetbrains.com/help/youtrack/server/Workflow-One-... and I thought they muted the notification email for the comment, but I couldn't find any evidence to support my recollection. Similarly, I thought they had a whole series of "low value comment" handlers but also similarly I wasn't able to find any evidence of my hallucination

One would hope all of the achievements period were rejected and this ridiculous idea of adding a gamerscore to a version control system wouldn't go past a round of laughter at the ones responsible, sadly it did go past.

Also related, the O'RLY Books <https://github.com/thepracticaldev/orly-full-res>

2FU is actually hilarious, I want some of these.

“Cheese Mover”: opens a PR that changes the format from tabs to spaces.

Self-award time:

- Procrastinator for at least one vague memory of some high-faluting idea which never went anywhere beyond creating the repo.

- Monkey Wrench was sort of inevitable back when working without feature branches.

- Patient Skeleton: Sometimes I've pinged people ~yearly for a good while before realising it's just not happening.

Suggested:

"The useless": posted a message like 'x is broken'. No screenshots, no error logs, nothing.

It's been a joke among 2 of my friends (and collaborators) that no matter what code they write, a "cleanup" commit by me would refactor/prettify everything.

I deserve the Tee Hee (and some professional help).

Of course, Monkey Wrench is inevitableas well.

One I hit the other day by accident:

"What changes?": As a maintainer, you accidentally update a committer's branch with main instead of your local changes, which closes the PR and drops your access to push to the committer's branch.

I have gone years working on projects completely solo. Probably 99% of my commit messages are just the word "update". I also tend to do it excessively, like I am afraid the hard drive is about to crash or something (so far it hasn't).

Not sure what you would call that. Maybe "The Saver", or "The Save Scummer", or "The Scummer", or maybe just "Scum". (I can see the last one if anyone else was actually looking at these commit messages, but that almost never happens, and on the rare occasion when I know they will, such as for a PR or something, I rebase and write something descriptive).

i would split that out in two:

how about "lazy committer" for being to lazy to write descriptive commit messages. ;-)

and "the saver" for making more than 30 small commits within an hour or something like that.

"Minor Fix - make a commit that changes 30 files or more with a commit message length less than 9 characters"

These are hilarious, but I see why they might be rejected.

"Stalewhale": awarded to a project when more than 20% of the issues are closed by a stalebot.

Suggested - Octopus. For those that like pulling in a huge number of merges a bit like Cthulhu. See https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/21/361 for details.

Honestly the fact that we're too scared or sensitive to flag anti-patterns like these, is a disservice to the evolution of the practice of software development.

Most people would benefit from this feedback... maybe if it was not public-facing, it could be palatable as a legitimate feature.

Most people don't learn well in response to public criticism.

“The Builder” : Push multiple successive commits with the message ‘WIP’ to the default branch

"Wipe out someone else's commits by force pushing to the main branch."

Is this possible in Github? I figured owner the repo's owner has this right and it may be disabled by default.

I don't believe branches are protected by default.

Groupie: gives thumbs up for every release for 3 years

These would have been very useful for hiring managers.

GitHub achievement badges seem a little juvenile and cringy and even if they successfully gamify GitHub, is that really a good thing? Are more commits and more issues necessarily a good thing? At best they draw focus to the wrong things, and at worst could become the basis of social-media style boastfulness.

Nope, it's really not a good thing. The github main page when you go there now is a "feed" page similar to other social media (twitter, facebook) that allows you to see stuff and tweak what the stream should show you. It's not a useful direction to go IMO. I don't want another feed/follow site.

It pains me that I've worked with people that were gunning for a few of these.

Shit. I make sure that I'm able to unlock almost these badges. =))

Those are better than the approved ones.

Fun to see folks enjoying this! :)

i love all of these. hopefully someone will make a board game out of these somehow

This repo gave me a good laugh.

I’d have:

- Vital contributor

- Sith Lord

- Secret Santa (twice even!)

- Monkey Wrench

- Patient Sceleton (still waiting)

- works on my machine

Not bad!

"Collector of Cutlery": forks every interesting repo they come across, just as a way of bookmarking them.

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