Idea to stop PR spam

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

Hi,

Followup on #3484 (comment)

My idea: if any PR is opened with a title that does not start with UPSTREAM: it should be closed immediately with a helpful message to the user.

In that case users who push here by mistake would get their PR closed before even pushing a second commit, greatly reducing the number of spam emails.

Likewise, it would make it easy to add rule to our mail clients to auto delete those mails because of the subject line.

[rjzupkoii]

Interesting idea, but I am a bit concerned that some of intentional PRs might not be pushed as well since people wouldn't be familiar with the workflow and I'm not really aware of any other projects that use that sort of tagging.

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

To me, a PR by someone who will not check the closing message (the one that says why it was closed and how to reopen it) is definitely not worth merging. The ratio of mistaken push to actual PR is at least 100.

[iBug]

Maybe my idea here could help: mmistakes/minimal-mistakes#3313.

The observation is all spammy PR authors pay no attention to whatever is populated in the PR dialog for them to read, so I added something like "delete this comment block to confirm" and have a GitHub Actions to check them. Over years there has been only 1 false negative (but a few more false positives as there are legitimate PR authors who get confused).

If you want to push the precision forward, the best heuristics I've found is whether the url: key has been changed in _config.yml, but I find the current implementation satisfactory for now and want to avoid the complexity of fetching and parsing PR content.

[rjzupkoii]

Okay, so I've noticed an uptick in bad PRs and have implemented the suggestion by @iBug - once it has a chance to be tested a bit I'll close out this task as complete.

[rjzupkoii]

I haven't seen any PRs in the past week, so going to go ahead and close this.