Public spam score for GitHub profiles

[pandafy]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Body

Maintainer burnout has become one of the biggest challenges in open source, and the recent rise in AI-assisted spam contributions is making it worse. AI is a powerful tool when used responsibly, but it also enables contributors to generate large volumes of low-effort pull requests and issues that require maintainers to spend valuable time reviewing and rejecting them. The problem isn't AI itself, it's the incentive to maximize contribution counts rather than contribution quality.

One feature that could help is a public Spam Score displayed by default on GitHub profiles. Similar to how contribution graphs encourage activity, a Spam Score could discourage repeated low-value behavior. The score could be based on signals such as rejected or closed-without-merge pull requests, spam reports, duplicate issues, repeated trivial changes, and other repository-wide moderation signals. It should be transparent, appealable, and designed to minimize false positives.

Such a signal would incentivise meaningful contributions over quantity, help maintainers identify potentially abusive patterns more quickly, and reduce the review burden without discouraging genuine contributors who use AI responsibly.

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[Developer-Vinayak]

This is a great idea! A public spam score could really help maintainers save time and focus on quality contributions.
A few thoughts on how this could work:

The score could track patterns like: repeated closed-without-merge PRs, duplicate issues, and flagged spam reports
It should be transparent and appealable so genuine contributors aren't wrongly penalized
New users should start with a neutral score to avoid discouraging first-time contributors

This would shift the community focus from quantity to quality, which is especially important now with the rise of AI-generated low-effort contributions. Hope GitHub considers this! 🙌