Do you then fix the typo with no attribution to the original reporter? Or do you just choose not to fix a known error because you question the motives of the reporter?
Usually this is stuff like fixing "// TODO: this fails reguarly in the CI" (real example from the last such PR). It's the kind of thing I'll fix if I see it, but not really worth going out of my way fixing something like that: it's just a comment in some test code (not user-facing) and the few people that will ever see that comment understand "reguarly" as well. It's a non-issue and basically just spam IMHO.
These are always either bots or people looking to bolster their CV by bragging they "contributed" n PRs to n repos. I signed up to collaboratively make some (hopefully nice) software, not to deal with a stream of PRs like this.
Typos in README or publicly facing docs are different; I usually merge those (and those are almost always good faith too, because usually a real human picks up on them before the bots/script kiddies do).
I think the people responding are missing the point.
I've also submitted PRs that just fixed typos, and I've considered that a legit contribution.
But if I maintained a high-profile project right now, I'd at least take pause in thinking some of these accounts could be spam reputation-boosting accounts that only make comments/PRs to lend legitimacy to the account when it ultimately stars some artificially boosted repo.
And making it harder to detect star manipulation erodes the signals of trust which have been used on Github, and ultimately can be a security concern (historically I've looked at numbers of contributors, stars, downloads, and issues open/closed as a rough idea of how secure some npm dependency might be.. basically the idea that "more eyeballs" can mean slightly less chance of a massive security issue, especially in security-critical code like oauth libraries)
I don't know what the solution is here. Maybe requiring people sign a CLA like some corporate open source projects do is at least enough of a barrier
Honestly, who cares if the end result is the same? Their forked repo with the patch on still exists, the patch was incorporated in whatever way made sense to the original repo owner.
OK, a credit, but really, who cares? People can see what an accepted pull request consisted of, so I'm not sure they're kidding anybody in terms of boosting their reputation with credits for fixing typos.
All the same, I'm just glad to see people improve their presentation, especially typos.
I had the same thought. Is fixing typos not contributing? Should I not be submitting PRs to help with documentation/polish/etc? I never even thought that trying to help would be viewed as malicious.
Project maintainers frequently hold themselves back with amateur presentation, and that includes typos. It's hard to take some things seriously if they are failing at English, let alone their programming language of choice. It's sad because there's plenty of amazing open source out there, but the presentation is terribad.
IMO, the solution is simple: allow project maintainers to disable pointless metrics that would incentivize the GitHub equivocal to karma farming.
I also think the quality of comment on HN suffers for the fact that the karma score is visible metric to the end-user. Reddit particularly. The view count on tweets too.
Denying that PR and fixing it yourself is taking credit for others' work, and leaving it in is no good either. I don't see any upside to rejecting them. I'd be ashamed of myself for that.
It probably was legitimate. There are tons of people (myself included) that send PRs to fix typos and such. I also accept PRs like that to my own projects.
A lot more people will read the docs than the code, and typos are annoying and for some people highly distracting (OCD)
It probably was not legitimate. There are wonderful people like you but they are dwarfed by the thousands of scam accounts using this method to try and engineer legitimacy.
It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one with this issue. Typos can be extremely disruptive, often compelling me to re-read the entire sentence.
how is it a con if it's a useful contribution? it's not my job to filter bot accounts used for starring repos. if a PR improves my project I'll accept it.
If it’s useful (actually), it’s not a con on you of course! It does pollute the overall ecosystem though, since it is used to prop up fake stars and the like.
Same. There ought to be a way to submit inconsequential things like typos through a separate system that don't get counted as pull requests. That way the people who are genuinely claiming good faith shouldn't really care if it doesn't count as part of your "PR score".