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@betatim betatim commented Jul 23, 2025

What does this implement/fix? Explain your changes.

This adds a short FAQ entry explaining what the "spam" label means, and gives some hints what people can do to increase the chances of it being removed.

The idea is to use this label to mark issues and PRs that are somehow "spammy". This could be because they contain no content, are duplicates, fully automated contributions, or other reasons that make a maintainer think "no effort went into making this contribution". The goal is to provide a simple way to deal with "low effort" contributions.

A label is a simple way to get started with this. It will allow us to collect some experience with how often this happens, how people react to it and we can build more tooling on top of it (e.g. a bot that comments on labelled issues or auto closes them, etc).

While maintainers can comment on an issue directly with a short note and explanation I think this has two disadvantages:

  1. it means you are now subscribed to the issue/PR and notifications appear amongst your "participating" ones
  2. users tend to argue/discuss with other humans, where as they rarely argue with bots (c.f. code formatting)

Please do not use this label for "low quality" issues/PRs - what we judge to be a low quality issue/PR might be the result of a beginner putting in a lot of effort. We should respect that and try to coach people as we do today (within the constraints we have). I hope we will manage to separate between "low effort contributions by capable people" and "low quality contribution by a beginner", even though they might appear similar.

I decided to (re)use the "spam" label because it already exists, isn't widely used and while maybe not the best name we did not manage to come up with a great name either.

Any other comments?

We briefly discussed this in discord and in #31679, there is no dedicated issue for this though.

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@lucyleeow
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Please do not use this label for "low quality" issues/PRs

I think a set of labels of the format 'lacking ...' would be nice (e.g., 'lacking context' for issues where there is not linked triaged issue and no explanation for the change). These labels could even be linked with a bot that gives information about how to improve the PR. I think this is more informative for the contributor. It also means we can more easily add such a label when the PR is poor quality, without worry about offending, as it is not so 'negative'.

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betatim commented Jul 24, 2025

Can we do labels for helping people who made an honest effort but need help in a new issue/PR? For me that is a separate topic from having a label for things that people put no effort into.

@lucyleeow
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Fair point. I guess spam felt to me like the problem with the PR was generally more egregious (e.g., a copy of a recent issue) but now I read the list again, it does seem fair.

improve the diff to remove noise and unrelated changes

This one is tricky because I have seen genuine PRs where their linter or git mishap has cause unrelated changes.

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betatim commented Jul 25, 2025

The list of things to do is meant as something people can do, not as "messy diff, let me slap a spam label on this PR!". At least for me a spammy/low effort/not in good faith PR judgement is the result of the overall impression. Of which a terribly messy diff might be one factor.

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Leaving some comments, thank you @betatim!

Co-authored-by: Stefanie Senger <91849487+StefanieSenger@users.noreply.github.com>
Abhijais4896

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ogrisel commented Jul 28, 2025

We might want to also use this label to PRs that are closed right away, for instance because the PRs was opened before reaching a conclusion in the related issue. If we do so we need to update the FAQ accordingly.

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betatim commented Jul 29, 2025

Implemented Olivier's suggestions

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@ogrisel ogrisel left a comment

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Some further suggestions.

betatim and others added 3 commits July 31, 2025 14:14
Co-authored-by: Olivier Grisel <olivier.grisel@ensta.org>
Co-authored-by: Olivier Grisel <olivier.grisel@ensta.org>
Co-authored-by: Olivier Grisel <olivier.grisel@ensta.org>
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LGTM.

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