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Comment by hawkoy

5 years ago

I think a major part of this is about pushing devs who haven't contributed before to contribute such as new cs students.

3 comments

hawkoy

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mkl  5 years ago

That may be the intention, but what's happening is basically vandalism: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=is%3Apr+%22improve+docs%2...

~1000 single line/word pull requests in the last 3 hours, almost all worthless rubbish. The scale of the problem is pretty severe.

To pick a single example: https://github.com/Geng-WD/websiteTest

A little personal Java project, unchanged in 3 years, where a new "contributor" has submitted a pull request where they add a comment with their own name in one commit, and then remove it and replace it with "Awesome coding website" in a second commit. 19 hours earlier another new "contributor" submitted a pull request to add a completely irrelevant mock gym web page (and they've done the same thing to a bunch of other randomly chosen repos).

If these people had to demonstrate valuable contributions over a longer span of time, I don't think any of this nonsense would be happening. There's no reason new CS students can't be respectful and put a little effort into doing something worthwhile, and they'll learn a lot more than from this mindless spamming.

  • cyphar  5 years ago

    After looking at a few dozen accounts and their PR histories, the spammers seem to be just searching for repositories that have the word "website" in their description and picking a random set of 5 to send random requests to.