GitHub discusses giving maintainers control to disable PRs

Keep your code private if that's your attitude though. You don't want to share your code, you just want free advertisement.

You know what, you wrote your code, you didn't write github, you don't own github and you don't own the interaction github users have regarding public projects.

PRs are not your software. What you need to do is maintain a private git repo, or just make the repo private and post tarballs and builds on the releases page. that will solve the problem even better for you. you'll still be publishing source as well as executables that way. PRs are about github, it's users and their interaction with projects. When you give someone access to a repo, you can't complain when they create a feature branch and request a merge, that's all a PR is. In your case, you want to give people access to source code but not a repository, so do just that and leave people who want to publish a repository alone, or restrict access to your repo to a github organization with people you approve of to make contributions to private repos.

When you make it public, the public have the right to fix it and share their fixes with each other. They can do it on another repo, but they discovered the code through your repo, so the easiest way is by linking it to your repo. If you don't want to hear from people at all, just publish the source without giving anyone access to the repo, or send notifications to junk folder, or use a lockdown bot like in the other post, host it on your own server and publish it on your own site, the solutions for you are endless. For the public, which you've exposed your software to, not so much. and that's the problem.

You should understand that this line of thinking is exactly why everyone is trying to require developers to identify themselves, sign their code,etc... We're depending on software too much to be tolerant of willful sabotage and reckless endangerment (e.g.: security patches).

You did, by making the repo public. You didn't make a release tarball public, you made git repository, designed for collaborating on code changes public. In this case, other users of github (including the general public) are exposed to a repository and all that entails. If you have no intention to let others do PRs, you don't need to host a public repository, you just need to host public tarballs of your source code.

> they do not have a right to open requests on my page any more than people have a “right” to comment on a blog post or a YouTube video.

Youtube videos are one-way consumption of media. Git repositories have the concept of merging, which is taking remote repository content and assimilating it with your repo (as you know), that's PRs. public repo = public/open PRs, because that's how a vcs works. You're not hosting a social media content on Github, you're hosting a public version control system, and you have the ability to make it private.

Youtube is hardly a good analogy, perhaps twitter or blue sky is, although even then it's consumed content, not collaboration. In that example though, what you all are proposing here is similar to tweeting but turning off the ability to get "noted" by the community. You have the right to say whatever you want (within the site's policy), but others also have the right to make community corrections (notes) so you won't mislead others.