Like many of you, I've spent days debugging an open issue in an OSS repo, writing unit tests, making sure CI is green, and opening a clean PR with detailed reproduction notes—only for it to sit in review silence for 9 months until a bot eventually closes it as "stale."
GitHub stars and follower counts don't tell you anything about whether a project actually welcomes outside contributions:
junegunn/fzf (83k stars, Go): Maintains an incredible 82.6% community merge rate with first responses often landing in under an hour.
caddyserver/caddy (78k stars, Go): A responsive A-Tier reo with a 51.4% merge rate and active maintainer feedback cycles (~11h).
istio/istio (38k stars, Go): An S-Tier powerhouse with a 70.8% community merge rate and a median first response under 7 hours.
home-assistant/core (91k stars, Python): S-Tier, merging 68.8% of external PRs with ~2h response times.
strelov1/freehire (3.4k stars, Go): S-Tier with a 87.5% merge rate.
Many 50k+ star projects look active on paper, but 99% of merges are internal team commits; community PRs go straight into the graveyard.
I built GetMerged (https://getmerged.abhishekco.de) to surface maintainer review telemetry before you fork.
C-Rank (Contributor Readiness Score): A 0–100 rating that separates welcoming projects from ghost towns based on real external PR merge rate, median review latency (p50/p90), and reviewer bus factor.
Welcoming Rankings by Language: Curated leaderboards across Go, Rust, Python, TypeScript, etc., filtered by tier and active review signals.
Build it with Go + Next.js (SSR) + MySQL.
Try looking up a repo you frequently contribute to or maintain. I'd love your honest (and brutal) feedback on the scoring metrics. What other signals would save you from opening doomed PRs?
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