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Comment by zbentley

19 days ago

What on earth makes you think that denouncing a bot PR with stronger language would deter it? The bot does not and cannot care.

If that worked, then there would be an epidemic of phone scammers or email phishers having epiphanies and changing careers when their victims reply with (well deserved) angry screeds.

I didn't mean the "fuck off" part to be quite verbatim... this ghostty PR[0] is a good example of how this stuff should be handled. Notably: there's no attempt to review or provide feedback--it's instantly recognized as a slop PR--and it's an instant ban from repo.

This is the level of response these PRs deserve. What people shouldn't be doing is treating these as good-faith requests and trying to provide feedback or asking them to refactor, like they're mentoring a junior dev. It'll just fall on deaf ears.

[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/10588

  • Sure, but that pull request is blatantly unreviewable because of how it bundles dozens of entirely unrelated commits together. Just say that and move on: it only takes a one-line comment and it informs potential contributors about what to avoid if any of them is lurking the repo.

    • Sounds like we're largely saying the same thing. Open source maintainers should feel empowered to say "nope, this is slop, not reading, bye" and ban you from the repo, without worrying if that seems unprofessional.

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