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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a well-understood convention to opt out of "social coding". A way to put up a project under an open source license (or CC0/public-domain) along with a notice that says effectively, "feel free to fork, but don't file issues or submit patches."

You can put that in a README, but people won't read it. Github won't let you disable i̶s̶s̶u̶e̶s̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶e̶d̶ pull requests, unless you archive the project (making it read-only). Is it possible on one of the other hosting services, like Gitlab?

We need better ways to draw boundaries around open source projects and contributors.

ETA: How can we counter the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

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You can do this on SourceHut, just make a git.sr.ht repo and don't make anything else (ticket tracking, mailing lists, etc, are opt-in).

On GitHub you can disable issues but not pull requests.

I have never tried but perhaps someone could come up with a useless_machine[0] type of webhook[1] such that a pull request would do nothing but close itself

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine [1] https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/types/#pullr...

There are some projects like that on GH but they're marked as abandoned or clones of e.g. Linux. I understand where you're coming from but whatever it is you've open sourced won't be very popular, because open source software is less about technical excellence and more about popularity, market- and mindshare.

I mean I'm trying to pick an alternative to Ant Design (because Chinese) and there's a billion of them, but I'm having trouble deciding which one is the best option - Bootstrap, because most stars? Material UI because it shows up high in search results? And there's at least dozens more that will be objectively better (on a technical level) which I'll probably never see, and which I'll probably never use (because low popularity means low engagement and no guarantees that it'll still be around and maintained a few years down the line).

re: Ant - If you’re using React and don’t need more than barebones mobile support, I’ve found Blueprint to be great.

Assuming the author uses their own software, disabling the ability to hear about problems with it before you trip over it themselves is counterproductive. The minority of users would fix it and offer a PR in my experience, more would be willing to drop the author a note in an issue.

Unfortunately that useful information comes mixed in with, eg, users who think the author's time is worth so much less than theirs (didn't the author demonstrate it was worth nothing by offering this work for free?) they want hand-holding for every little thing. The author can put it in README.md and point these guys at it when closing their issue.

This is what we call "unmaintained" software. 'Unmaintained' may sound like a value judgment, but it's not - it's exactly what you're talking about; a project where any attempt to contact the putative maintainer is likely to be ignored altogether, and the "proper" channel for enhancement involves forking it and perhaps maintaining a version yourself.

Use the “No Maintenance Intended” badge:

http://unmaintained.tech/

Exactly – put that badge or the similar “Repo Status: Unsupported” badge (https://www.repostatus.org/#unsupported) in your README to succinctly communicate what users should expect from the project.

I would leave PRs available. Repo owner has no obligation to merge PRs however forks can still make use of upstream repo's PRs. That haplens usually when unmaintained repo accumulated a lot of popularity.

> Is it possible on one of the other hosting services, like Gitlab?

Looks like you can on GitLab under "Settings" > "General" > "Visibility, project features, permissions".

(new) GitLab engineer here. This is correct, it can be set to allow merge requests from "Only Project Members", or disabled entirely. You can also disable pretty much everything else as well, if desired.

Disclaimer: nobody submits contributions to my hobby projects anyway.

GitHub let's you disable Issues but not PRs. Not sure since when.

  echo "Don't" >CONTRIBUTING
  git add CONTRIBUTING
  git ci -m "Clarify that contributions are not welcome"
  git push

A "license" covers the legal situation, maybe we need a "social statement" or something to that effect that communicates the authors philosophy?

I'd be rather suspicious of pull requests from people too lazy to read the README, anyway.

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