TL;DR: More than 1 in 4 active open-source projects leave most pull requests from outside contributors with no human response for two weeks. The more stars a project has, the more likely it is to be one of them.
In Porchlamp's October 2026 snapshot of 11,000 GitHub projects, 1,133 of the 4,297 active projects (26.4%) left most outside pull requests with no human reply, review or merge within 14 days.
Why I looked
One of my pull requests once sat for four months before anyone merged it. Around the same time, a different project merged five of mine in a single day.
Same person, same kind of code. The only difference was the project. And nothing on a GitHub page tells you which kind you're about to deal with. Stars tell you a project is popular. They don't tell you if anyone will read your PR.
What I measured
I followed six months of pull requests from outside contributors to 11,000 GitHub projects: 212,390 PRs from 110,605 people.
For every PR the question was simple: did a human respond within two weeks? A reply, a review or a merge all count. A bot comment doesn't.
To keep it fair I left out bots, maintainers' own PRs, drafts, PRs the author closed themselves, and brand-new accounts.
Do popular open-source projects answer pull requests?
1. Silence is common. Of the 4,297 active, licensed projects with at least ten outside PRs, 1,133 left most of them unanswered for two weeks. I call these black holes.
2. More stars, more silence.
About 1 in 5 projects with 1k to 10k stars is a black hole. Above 50k stars it's closer to 2 in 5.
3. Popular isn't the same as welcoming. Of the 100 most-starred projects, just 9 reach the top 100 of the default Porchlamp ranking.
What this doesn't mean
- It's not a verdict on maintainers. Big projects get far more PRs than anyone can review.
- It only sees GitHub. Projects that review on a mailing list or Gerrit aren't judged at all.
- It's a snapshot (April to October 2026), so it will drift.
Check a project before you give it a weekend
I turned all of this into a free site, the Porchlamp rankings. It ranks open-source projects by what happens to a stranger's pull request, and you can re-rank it for your goal: a first contribution, career value, deep systems work, or AI-assisted work.
👉 See the Porchlamp rankings of 11,000 open-source projects
Looking for your first project? Here's where to send your first open-source pull request.
Every black-hole verdict links to the pull requests behind it, so you can check the evidence yourself.
What's the longest one of your PRs has ever waited?
Top comments (2)
The star-count finding is the one that stings — 39% black holes at 50k+ stars flips the usual advice to just pick a popular project on its head. I've had an outside PR sit for weeks with no signal either way, and honestly a quick not planned would have been kinder than silence, because at least you can move on. Treating responsiveness as a separate signal from popularity, like Porchlamp does, feels much healthier for first-time contributors.
It feels worse when they agree it is wanted, you spend months working on it and when it comes time to review the code and multiple PRs they show true colors