On 1/30/22 04:45, Inada Naoki wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 7:37 PM Irit Katriel <iritkatriel@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Some people may do "approval without review" to make their "Profile"
> page richer, because GitHub counts it as a contribution.
> Creating spam issues or pull requests can be reported as spam very
> easily. But "approve without review" is hard to be reported as spam.
> So approving random issue is the most easy way to earn contributions
> without reported as spam.
Whnever there are metrics, some will find a way to game the system to
make theirs look better - this certainly isn't limited to github, or to
tech, or in any way a recent thing.
Certainly true, and I think this is more of a social problem than a technical one. If people are giving out review approvals to get more points, you (where 'you' is a person with some privileges on the repo) can click "dismiss review" and get rid of the noise, at least within that PR. Maybe they still get points for the review, I'm not sure. Taking away the ability for non-core contributors to offer official review approvals to stop people like that only harms the people actually trying to do good work.
Gaming the system doesn't end up working well in the end anyway. The first time the gamers try to get a job interview and can't explain how they'd do a code review—something GitHub says they've done hundreds or thousands of times—the whole thing will fail.