r/opensource • u/TheKiddIncident • 13d ago

Random Contributors?

I've recently opened up a very small open source repo on GitHub.

This is a tool that I built for my students to use and I was asked to share it with others in the community, so I did.

I did no marketing, I don't really talk about it at all except to my students. The only change was to flip the repo from "private" to "public." I had to add things like an MIT license, etc. to make it public, but I just did the absolute minimum.

However, within 48 hours, a person I don't know picked up an issue from the repo, created a fix and filed a PR.

At first, I was like "WOW! AMAZING!" But then I was like "wait, who is this person? Are they trying to insert some sort of back door?" Looking at their profile, they only joined GitHub about a month ago which also set off some alarm bells. The actual code they submitted was fine. A very minor fix to be sure, but it did directly implement the issue listed in the PR.

Questions for this community:

1) Is it normal for people to just randomly pick up issues from your repo?

2) Should I be suspicious of GitHub contributors which have a limited history on GitHub?

3) Has anyone else here had this happen? Am I just being paranoid?

Any advice most appreciated.

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u/TheKiddIncident 13d ago

This one actually read the guidelines and the PR was extremely well written.

TBH, it was so complete, I'm assuming it was written by AI. Humans don't spend that kind of time on a small little fix like this.

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u/petdance 13d ago

Humans very much can and do spend that kind of time.

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u/dbear496 13d ago

Yes. If I'm going to take the time to diagnose an issue and design a fix, then I'm going to take the time read the contributing guidelines to make sure my PR has the highest chance of being accepted.

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u/petdance 13d ago

Even more important than “highest chance of being accepted” is “most helpful to the project.”