Exploring Solutions to Tackle Low-Quality Contributions on GitHub

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Hey everyone,

I wanted to provide an update on a critical issue affecting the open source community: the increasing volume of low-quality contributions that is creating significant operational challenges for maintainers.

We’ve been hearing from you that you’re dedicating substantial time to reviewing contributions that do not meet project quality standards for a number of reasons - they fail to follow project guidelines, are frequently abandoned shortly after submission, and are often AI-generated. As AI continues to reshape software development workflows and the nature of open source collaboration, I want you to know that we are actively investigating this problem and developing both immediate and longer-term strategic solutions.

What we're exploring

We’ve spent time reviewing feedback from community members, working directly with maintainers to explore various solutions, and looking through open source repositories to understand the nature of these contributions. Below is an overview of the solutions we’re currently evaluating.

Short-term solutions:

• Repository-level PR controls
  • Disable PRs entirely - This has been a long-standing request (since 2016) and is a first step in giving maintainers more tools to customize their PR experience. This also addresses use cases where maintainers want to share code without accepting external contributions, such as mirror repositories. A repo-level setting would also eliminate the need for custom automations that various open source projects are building to automatically close external PRs.
  • Restrict PRs to collaborators - This provides more granular access control, allowing contributions exclusively from existing collaborators while blocking external contributors.
• The ability to delete a PR from the UI - This provides maintainers with the ability to remove spam or low-quality PRs directly from the interface to improve repository organization.

Long-term direction:

As AI adoption accelerates, we recognize the need to proactively address how it can potentially transform both contributor and maintainer workflows. We are exploring:

• Enhanced permission models - Provide maintainers with more tools so they can customize their PR experience:
  • More granular controls for determining who can create and reviewing PRs beyond blocking all users or restricting to collaborators only.
  • Ways for maintainers to define criteria that PRs must meet before they can be opened.
• Improved triage tools - Potentially leveraging AI to evaluate contributions against project guidelines and standards to identify which contributions maintainers should focus on reviewing.
• Transparency in AI-assisted contributions - Improved visibility and attribution when AI tools are used throughout the PR lifecycle.

Next Steps

These are some starting points, and we’re continuing to explore both immediate improvements and long-term solutions. Please share your feedback, questions, or concerns in this thread. Your input is crucial to making sure we’re building the right things and tackling this challenge effectively. As always, thank you for being part of this conversation. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and working together to address this problem.