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Hypothetically if you’ve documented how you expect contributions to be, and someone doesn’t follow that, then at least they can’t say that they couldn’t have known what you wanted when you reject it.

The thing that is hard for people to get is that time costs a ton of money. If you use software without contributing back at all, you’re getting a lot for free but at least you’re not actively costing the project. If however you “contribute” in a lazy way, it starts to actively cost the maintainers to deal with this. So: feel free to contribute but read up on what a project wants and try to show that you’re at least meeting their effort halfway in terms of sufficient detail, following coding styles and request templates, etc.



I think it is better if you codify the rules that you can (with quality checker tools) and ignore the rest. Most of these tools are sophisticated enough that they don't let utter crap slide.




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