I taught myself programming and I also help open source projects with documentation and translation. Gonna be a bit until I can really make PRs with code but slowly working towards it.
What project are you referring to?
A good sign you’re hostile to potential contributors. Maybe have a clear readme that gets them a working dev environment in a command or two. Try not to shit on people in issues
When it doesn’t work, you get helpful bug reports *
That is people helping you
OpenSource is only as good as an active community it has, bad if not and with an lazy dev. FOSS without an update since years is risky crap.
Just archive it and take up farming.
I’ve heard some people take the approach of “merge everything”. Whatever people contribute, merge it. People like to feel like their time is valuable, and that their work is valued.
You can follow up the merge with polish or tweaks but if you merge contributions you’re more likely to see more.
I see where you came from.
There are people submitting code with wrong licenses or no attribution. There are people just submitting for the sake of submitting - I dare github profiles for this. There are people who could need some feedback on their code, so that future contributions have better quality.
And it can be very burdensome for a maintainer, assuming he maintains within its free time, to perfectly communicate and elaborate on each contribution.
Also, maybe the project has a feature freeze because in the aimed architecture the same solution would be implemented externally.
Its just not that simple and people generalizing or concluding too fast are mostlikely in the wrong. Bad PR travles faster and further though.
Don’t implement a user’s stupid idea, they fork the repo and somehow the fork gets more stars…
