HACKER Q&A
📣 iamflimflam1

How to pre-filter people raising GitHub issues


I’ve got quite a large number of demo projects on GitHub now. I seem to attract a lot of students looking to do their final projects - I’m happy with this - the whole point of publishing code is to help other people learn. But there is a small minority who obviously don’t have the necessary background or skills to approach the work and need remedial support to even get to the point of being able to run the code.

How can I filter these people out?

This may seem harsh, but these people also seem to be the most obnoxious and will post everywhere they can find me demanding my help.

I have a lot of empathy for them - they’ve obviously seen a project and though “hey, I can copy this and make a voice controlled robot” and then find they are completely stuck and failing - but if I gave them the support they need I’d have no time to do anything else.

  👤 ggm Accepted Answer ✓
I think this is very hard. I've been that person, desperately seeking clue to why my hammering on a gnu makefile isn't working in BSD make, or misunderstanding linker options and failing to link against the code. Or even, being a corner case of compiler flag mismatches.

The thing is, not everyone sees their own stupidity. And sometimes a bug IS a bug.

So your worry here is two sided. You want 'you have to be this tall (competent) to play there' alongside 'is this inept fool actually telling me something I need to hear'

Sometimes asking for a diff is enough of a test. Not a pull request necessarily, just evidence they even understood how to try to change the code. I know it's a test which I fail often, and so it's a strong test for a well meaning fool.