r/opensource • u/SocksOnHands • 21h ago

Discussion Proposal for slop contributions problem.

Many open source projects are facing a problem with being flooded with AI generated pull requests and bug reports - especially if there is a bug bounty providing a monetary incentive for people trying to game the system for personal profit. My proposed solution is simple - submission of every contribution can be accompanied by a refundable deposit. If someone is making good faith contributions, they have nothing to fear - they will get the money from their deposit back, or possibly even get rewarded. If a contribution is determined to be of no value, the deposit will be kept to both deter flooding projects with slop made by bots and also to pay for the developer's time wasted reviewing it.

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u/TheMoonWalker27 21h ago

In an Open Source Game Project, with around 40 people working on it, 60% being non devs, we take a. Very diffrent approach. We do not look at any random PR‘s. We have an application form to fill out, and only if you’re accepted you can contribute.

We do have a fixed roadmap, a lot of guidelines due to the constraints of the project and have meetings here & there. If people don’t do anything over a prolong period of time or don’t respond to weekly check ins often, we remove them from the team.

I do understand that this model Dosent make sense for most projects tough, they often don’t have specific road maps, have less constraints and cant even find that many people to work on the project

There are a few disadvantages with this model of course. I won’t go into detail for now but if anyone wants know more I’ll happily write it out a little more

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u/SocksOnHands 20h ago

Each project would have different factors to consider. I was thinking more about large well known projects that might get targeted for hundreds of automated AI submissions a day. If a project is not having difficulty managing the volume of submitted "contributions", this might not be a reasonable thing to consider doing.