Never the less something like this is likely needed. With reference to the digital ocean free shirt pull request saga :)
But I wouldn't necessarily want to block new developers from being able to contribute to a project. I think it would be best to have anyone able to contribute, but perhaps a flag on the project owner side to see that user's rating.
Are you joking here, or do you literally mean, that (besides fixing) this would cause bugs? I hadn't thought about that.
> Obviously since you are just starting out your users won't have too many issues merged
Sponsors may very well be looking for a temporary fix, something that can last them a year, or one project. No credibility necessary, just a fix.
Not really a problem, though; a sponsor can fork on Github, then put a bounty and accept the PR even though upstream would never merge it.
For our open source project (https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups). We participated in hacktoberfest recently and one problem we ran into is people submitting low quality PRs. Which ends up taking up way more time to review than to merge.
I would love to be able to filter by users who have merged multiple issues or some sort of quality bar for our bounties. Obviously since you are just starting out your users won't have too many issues merged. You might be able to work around this by finding the number of Github issues an author have merged previously to any projects that is greater than x number of stars. This way you might be able to bootstrap some credibility of the authors. Then a open source maintainer can gate on only allowing some reputable contributors.
One inspiration I would recommend is taking a look at how 99designs has different tiers of designers you can have a bounty for your design. If you could build 99design for open project that would be amazing. Best of Luck!