Proposed contributions can in fact have negative value, if the contributor implements some feature or bug fix in a way that makes it more difficult to maintain in the long term or introduces bugs in other code.
And even if such contribution is ultimately rejected, someone knowledgeable has to spend time and effort reviewing such code first - time and effort that could have been spend on another, more useful PR.
It's not wrong, it's just based on the assumption that the projects wants contributors.
Quite obviously, any incidental friction makes this ever so slightly harder or less likely. Good contributions don't necessarily or only come from people who are already determined from the get go. Many might just want to dabble at first, or they are just casually browsing and see something that catches their attention.
Every projects needs some form of gatekeeping at some level. But it's unclear to me whether the solution is to avoid platforms with high visibility and tools that are very common and familiar. You probably need a more sophisticated and granular filter than that.
"Crafting an email" in the format required by many email-based projects is hardly easy for the average user, who's most likely using a webmail service that does not have much control over line wrapping and the like. Accepting patches in attachments (instead of the email body) helps with this, but naive users can still easily get caught by using HTML email, which many project maintainers love to performatively turn up their noses at.
For one, it's semantic: It's only a contribution if it adds value to a project.
What you probably mean is that "not everything handed to us is a contribution". And that's valid: There will be a lot of issues, code, discussions, ideas, and what more that substract, or have negative value. One can call this "spam".
So, the problem to solve, is to avoid the "spam" and allow the contributions. Or, if you disagree with the semantics, avoid the "negative value contributions" and "allow the positive value contributions".
A part of that solution is technical: filters, bots, tools, CI/CD, etc. Many of which github doesn't offer, BTW. A big part is social and process: guidelines, expectations, codes-of-conduct, etc. I've worked in some Open Source projects where the barriers to entry where really high, with endorsements, red-tape, sign-offs, wavers, proof-of-conducts etc. And a large part is simply inevitable "resources". It takes resources to manage the incoming stuff, enforce the above, communicate it, forever, etc.
If someone isn't willing to commit these resources, or cannot, then, ultimately, the right choice to make is to simply not allow contributions - it can still be open source, just won't take input. Like e.g. sqlite.
This isn't a platform issue — it's a problem with the PR system, and arguably with open source itself. If you're unwilling to spend time on anything beyond writing code, maybe keep the project closed-source.
Or, more obviously, make it open-source, and make a big fat note in the README of "I will not accept PRs, this repo is just for your consumption, fork it if you want to change it".
It's not a binary. Many projects do want PRs, but it doesn't mean they have to accept any random PR, or fawn over every contributor who creates an obviously low-effort one. It's perfectly fine to "gatekeep" on quality matters, and that does mean acknowledging the fact that not all contributors are equally valuable.
> fawn over every contributor who creates an obviously low-effort one
It's that sense of superiority that pisses me off.
Many maintainers condescendingly reply "contributions welcome" in response to user complaints. People like that had better accept whatever they get. They could have easily done it themselves in all their "high quality" ways. They could have said "I don't have time for this" or even "I don't want to work on this". No, they went and challenged people to contribute instead. Then when they get what they wanted they suddenly decide they don't want it anymore? Bullshit.
You're making the assumption that these are "high quality" projects, that someone poured their very soul into every single line of code in the repository. Chances are it's just someone else's own low effort implementation. Maybe someone else's hobby project. Maybe it's some legacy stuff that's too useful to delete but too complex to fully rewrite. When you dive in, you discover that "doing it properly" very well means putting way too much effort into paying off the technical debts of others. So who's signing up to do that for ungrateful maintainers for free? Who wants to risk doing all that work only to end up ignored and rejected? Lol.
Just slap things together until they work. As long as your problem's fixed, it's fine. It's not your baby you're taking care of. They should be grateful you even sent the patches in. If they don't like it, just keep your commits and rebase, maybe make a custom package that overrides the official one from the Linux distribution. No need to worry about it, after all your version's fixed and theirs isn't. Best part is this tends to get these maintainers to wake up and "properly" implement things on their side... Which is exactly what users wanted in the first place! Wow!
Let all those "bad PRs" with useful features and fixes accumulate at your own peril. You might wake up one day and find you're not upstream anymore because someone else has merged them all into a fork. I've seen it happen.
You seem to assume that in all cases such situation would be a problem.
In fact it not always is a problem. For some I would love if someone else would maintain it, for some fork is friendly and has a bit different purpose and so on.
> People like that had better accept whatever they get.
FOSS maintainers are not a unified mind. The people who go "contributions welcome" and "#hacktoberfest" are somewhere near one end of the spectrum, and the folks dealing with low-effort contributions are somewhere near the other end of the spectrum.
Of course not. That's why I singled out a very specific kind of maintainer: the type who thinks himself superior to users even when they engage at their level. Guys so good they can't be bothered to do it themselves but complain when others do it.
Good maintainers may be firm but they are always nice and grateful, and they treat people as their equals. They don't beg others for their time and effort. If they do, they don't gratuitously shit on people when they get the results. They work with contributors in order to get their work reviewed, revised and merged. They might even just merge it as-is, it can always be refactored afterwards.
That's hard to do and that's why doing it makes them good maintainers. Telling people their "contributions are welcome" only to not welcome their contributions when they do come is the real "low effort".
> Just slap things together until they work. As long as your problem's fixed, it's fine. It's not your baby you're taking care of. They should be grateful you even sent the patches in.
Thank you for a clear and concise illustration of why some contributions are really not welcome.
Just about the only thing I will agree with you on is that projects should indeed make it clear what the bar for the proper contribution is. This doesn't mean never saying "contributions are welcome", if they are indeed welcome - it's still the expectation for whoever is contributing to do the bare minimum to locate those requirements (e.g. by actually, you know, reading CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the repo before opening a PR - which many people do not.)
Making things clear and being honest about the scope and status of the project is always a good thing.
Dismissing users making feature requests and reporting bugs with a "PRs welcome" cliche is quite disrespectful and very much a sign of a superior attitude.
Proposed contributions can in fact have negative value, if the contributor implements some feature or bug fix in a way that makes it more difficult to maintain in the long term or introduces bugs in other code.
And even if such contribution is ultimately rejected, someone knowledgeable has to spend time and effort reviewing such code first - time and effort that could have been spend on another, more useful PR.