| Dealing with users/contributors in open source indeed has its issues due to the low barrier and global nature, meaning you can receive both high and low quality comments/patches/etc, and sometimes the language barrier makes a good quality interaction look bad. In order not to drain your energy dealing with them, you have learn how to deal with them efficiently. What works for me is: - Always respond to the initial question/comment/PR. Not necessarily immediately. But it lets people know you have seen it and they are not being ignored. If they DM but you rather have them use another way of communicating, just point that out. - Give people the benefit of the doubt. Some people just don't know how to ask a good question or how to report an issue in a constructive way, so just respond with a remark that nudges them in the right direction, possibly have some document ready describing how people should ask questions (for example, like https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask). - Don't continue fruitless discussions. I don't repeat things I said earlier, unless there is something to clarify. If someone disagrees with me and I don't see the merit in their points, then so be it. At some point you just have to ignore messages, and don't feel bad about doing that. If someone DMs and you said to create a ticket instead, and they DM again saying things like "but it's just this small thing" or "but I just told you", I'll just ignore that, and if they really care about the issue they'll eventually figure it out. - When it comes to low quality pull requests, tell the author how to improve them. Ideally, I should be able to merge PRs without any changes necessary on my part. This will both lower the amount of work I have to do, as well as educate the author so they will be more productive in the future. - I try not to be too fussy about how people want to contribute. I'll just as happy to accept a patch sent via email as a PR. And sometimes it's just less work to copy&paste a DM into a ticket instead of educating the user. |
I agree that this probably the ideal thing to do in the long run but, especially as a less social person, often it feels much easier to just do the minor fixes required myself. Training people to be good contributors is a good thing to do, but it is also something that can be very draining.