This is a great article. I respect every FOSS maintainer for what they're doing and am saddened by the bs I often see them deal with. The article is balanced in describing different reasons for coming off rude--as a non-native speaker of English I've been rude without meaning to, for example. But even if the intentions weren't bad per se, these interactions are an unnecessary burden to the maintainer.
So to reiterate: any bug report or pull request that isn't good will waste the maintainer's time and effort. I wonder if the community could address that. I mean, most anyone could screen issues for tone and the effort taken. We could have a group of volunteers that tag issues worthy of the maintainer's time and explain to reporters how they should improve. That would be a valuable contribution to FOSS.
Setting up the system to do this is not trivial, however. Ideally I'd love to just tag my repos for issue review. I'd wish for the reviewers to be trustworthy. And as a volunteer reviewer I'd want a queue of issues to review, and I'd require some compensation (e.g. a profile page showing how helpful I've been).
I guess the feasibility of this idea comes down to the availability of volunteers. What do you people think?
PS. Burntsushi, if you're reading this, huge thanks for your great software. You're one of the people whose contributions I appreciate the most in FOSS.
You have an interesting idea, but it seems tricky to pull off in practice. To be clear, I'm not necessarily trying to say that low effort issues _are_ a waste of my time, but rather, that is sometimes how _I feel_. I think it would be good to collectively reduce their occurrence---I'm not sure how---but sometimes the choice isn't between "low effort issue" and "high quality issue," but rather, "low effort issue" and "none at all." In the latter case, I'm not sure which I would prefer. Certainly, sometimes low effort issues really do lead to productive outcomes.
It's tough and it's not something that has an easy answer. Some part of it is me overcoming how negatively I feel about them and another part is perhaps others spending a bit more time filing good issues. At least, in my opinion anyway!
I didn't mean to imply how you think or feel. Sorry if my comment came off that way.
Maintainer burnout is a real problem and I personally would run a real risk if I ever released something worthwhile.
I agree that the idea is raw and difficult to implement, but we should think about these things as a community (ie. I don't have the energy to do anything about it, but I'm hoping someone would).
So to reiterate: any bug report or pull request that isn't good will waste the maintainer's time and effort. I wonder if the community could address that. I mean, most anyone could screen issues for tone and the effort taken. We could have a group of volunteers that tag issues worthy of the maintainer's time and explain to reporters how they should improve. That would be a valuable contribution to FOSS.
Setting up the system to do this is not trivial, however. Ideally I'd love to just tag my repos for issue review. I'd wish for the reviewers to be trustworthy. And as a volunteer reviewer I'd want a queue of issues to review, and I'd require some compensation (e.g. a profile page showing how helpful I've been).
I guess the feasibility of this idea comes down to the availability of volunteers. What do you people think?
PS. Burntsushi, if you're reading this, huge thanks for your great software. You're one of the people whose contributions I appreciate the most in FOSS.