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So recently my open source project took off and got trending on GitHub (680 starts and 225 forks). This was the first time a project of mine really gained some traction and invested more of my time and weekends to maintain this project - I wrote comprehensive docs, contributing guidelines and reviewed PRs and made sure I commented on every single one of them. Sure, it isn't easy to review 50 PRs a day after coming home from work but the excitement of seeing this project becoming trending fueled me.

First 2 weeks it was good. I would come home from work and have dinner and sit down to maintain the project. Whenever contributors would be stuck, I would help them and write comments on each PR.

But the problem started since last week. People just really want to see their contribution activity graph get populated and hence they would make stupid PRs and literally no one followed contributing guidelines - I mentioned in that that the code should adhere to Pep8 styling but no one gave a shit. Each day I would spend reviewing PR with crappy formatted code and no sign of Pep8, and even some will just file PR and add a fucking docstring to every function or add paragraph of comments. Also, the PR quality was bad with unsquashed commits amounting to 10 or 20 or even sometimes 50.

I wrote the contributing guidelines doc and in that I mentioned every source that contributors could find helpful like how to squash commits, how to file a PR and Pep8 and not to write useless comments. Seriously people, grow up!

Comments
  • 8
    Its python, did you expect the python community to be over 12 years old?
  • 5
    Welcome to Hacktoberfest. It will die down when the event is over. (Not a slight at Hacktoberfest, just some people want a reward for no effort)
  • 1
    That's Hacktoberfest.
    PR Activity will practically die once it's over.
  • 4
    Add a test for pep8 standards, add a CI service and only accept stuff that passes...
  • 2
    Maybe add some static code analysis tool, that automatically checks and fails PR. Smth like Codacy.
  • 2
    Ahh.. Quality problems

    Welcome to success, where you realize that 99% of people are stupid and or lazy. Sucks at first, but then you come to know it's a good thing. Welcome aboard.
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