[edf13]

I can see why this would end in suspension - you even mention yourself that when launching the bot (Even on a limited number of repos) you had bugs which messed up README's....

This sounds like a terrible idea! I wouldn't want an automated bot trying to auto-correct my work in this manner

[Matt3o12_]

I would actually really appreciate a bot that does that. There are so many bandges which are broken which is just annoying and many maintainers do not care about the readme once they have written it. They do accept pull requests but don’t update it manually.

And since the bot is only creating pull requests, I don’t see any harm: worst case for my repo, it would brake the readme but I double check it just like any other pull request, realize that it messed up, and fix it myself (but I would be thankful the bot noticed the broken link and I have a motivation to fix it).

What is a bit problematic about this bot would be that, due to a bug, it starts spamming (creating 1000 of pull requests) flagging false positives, etc).

Furthermore, it is also important where to draw the line. A bot that notices something is broken and offers me a fix is ok. A bot that notices I use a working service X and offers a pull requests to use service Y could be problematic because it might be useful but might also be annoying (because it is advertising, and service X might be good enough for me.

[daveFNbuck]

The issue with bots is never a particular bot. GitHub is just trying to avoid a situation where a large percentage of pull requests are coming from bots. This would drive people off of the platform even if every individual bot were reasonable and justified.

[movermeyer]

Yes, the bot made broken pull requests to some 35 repos before all the issues were ironed out. As a maintainer of those repos, I would be annoyed at these 'corrections'.

For my part, I manually corrected all of them and apologized to the maintainers for any inconvenience. The corrected pull requests were accepted, and the bot went on to submit correct fixes to several hundred other repos.

There's always the opportunity for bugs, but once they were ironed out it was able to happily submit correct fixes for hundreds more. I think that makes the idea worth something.

[masklinn]

> I can see why this would end in suspension - you even mention yourself that when launching the bot (Even on a limited number of repos) you had bugs which messed up README's....

It just opens a PR though, it's not like it actually breaks anything.

The one big issue is that it's spammy.

At the same time, I wonder how you could contact maintainers to see if they're interested, I feel opening an issue would be just as spammy, to say nothing of DM-ing maintainers, or tagging them on issues in your own repository.

You'd want this sort of behaviours to be opt-in, but at the same time you'd be limited by awareness. It's not like this is a big/complex change so chances are the maintainers just don't know about the issue or how to fix it.