This is exactly why it's a bad thing in general to have a single metric or small group of metrics that can be optimized. It always leads to bad actors using technical tools to game them. But we keep making the same mistake.

I call those drive-by PRs. If you work on an even moderately popular project, you’ll end up with people showing up - who have never contributed before - and submitting patches for stuff like typos in your comments that they found with some auto scanning tool.

As far as I can tell, there are people whose entire Github activity is submitting PRs like that. It would be one thing if they were diving into a big codebase, trying to learn it, and wanted to submit a patch for some small issue they found to get acquainted with the maintainers, or just contribute a little as they learned, but they drop one patch like that, then move on to the next project.

I don’t understand the appeal, but to each their own, I guess.

Genuine curiosity - admittedly these sorts of “contributors” probably aren’t doing it out of a passion for FOSS or any particular project, but if it’s something that fixes an issue (however small) is that actually a net negative for the project?

Maybe I have some sort of bias, but it feels like a lot of the projects I see specifically request help with these sorts of low-hanging-fruit contributions (lumping typos in with documentation).

I don't think these PRs are a net negative for a project - I've never turned one down, anyway. I just don't understand what the contributor gets out of the arrangement, other than Github badges. Some theories I've held:

1) They want/intend to contribute more and are starting small, but either get overwhelmed, lose interest, don't have enough time, etc.

2) They are students padding their resumes (making small PRs so they can say they contributed to x-number of open source projects.)

3) Its just the Github badges.

>1) They want/intend to contribute more and are starting small, but either get overwhelmed, lose interest, don't have enough time, etc

Yeah that's essentially how people are encouraged to start contributing to open source projects, making small changes and cleaning up documentation and such. It's hard to allow for this while also preventing the other two categories.

>submitting patches for stuff like typos in your comments that they found with some auto scanning tool

Wonder how long it'll be until we see wars back and forth between people submitting 'corrections' for things that are just spelled different between dialects like we see on Wikipedia.

... and then maintainers having to come up with "style manuals" to codify a project's preference and avoid this ping pong ...

You could just do it onto fake projects created for metrics as well, so nothing real is harmed :D