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Discussion on: What are the best practices for accepting PRs?

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phillie profile image
Philly

YESSS to what Dian said before. 😊

Besides the technical aspects: as a maintainer of an open source project you might end up coding less but instead responding to issues, pull requests (...) more - depending on your projects popularity.

So it'd be beneficial to reduce the volume of unwanted contributions in the first place. While this may feel unkind at the beginning, it's actually helpful for both parties. To do so you should clearly communicate your expectations and explain your projects's process for submitting and accepting contributions in your contributing guidelines. Writing things down is one of the most important things you can do as a maintainer.

Also, maybe these open source guides are interesting to you?! They provide some further useful and valuable tips for open source project maintainers, and contributors. 🙂

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay

Contributing guidelines are a huge asset! They help people interested in submitting pull requests figure out what they need to do without interrupting you, and if someone submits a PR that doesn't fulfill your requirements (code standards, tests, documentation) you can just point them there. GitHub recommends a CONTRIBUTING.md in your repo root which seems like a sensible standard.