How Can GitHub Fix Spamming?

A take on how GitHub can fix its spamming issues - especially when the world is getting more and more AI centric.

Background

Recently there has been a spike in spamming on GitHub on things like issues and PR. Some say that its because of events like hacktoberfest and some say that its because of Indians - I don’t know if second one is true but yes, its annoying. Yes it ruins our lives. Yes everyone is talking about it.

I want to focus on how GitHub can fix this or maybe one of us can create a open source tool to help other developer beat the spammers.

Targets

First lets define what we are targetting. Most common spammers are on issues or pull requests:

Issues: People don’t write enough information about the issue or steps to reproduce. && some issues are straight-up duplicates.
Pull requests: Most of the time PRs are just bougus. With edits no one asked for and no one wanted them.

Potential Fixes

With a rise in AI tools specifically GitHub Copilot. Why don’t we have a AI which scans through issues and PRs? I mean it can be something like YouTube’s comments spam checker.

For those who don’t know, if you comment something and YouTube thinks its spam, it will go to the creators’ “Review” section where they can either delete or approve the comment. Its pretty good but not as perfect, but at least something.

If Google can do this, so can Microsoft. I think instead of Microsoft improving on Copilot (which is already good enough) they should maybe focus on mitigating the spam problem.

Yes it won’t be perfect at first but its AI, over time it should be great especially when developers mark things as “spam”. This can be a start to a very huge and complex problem.

P.S

I don’t know if GitHub or anyone will do this but saying that only one group of people are responsible for this is quite disturbing. I’m sure there are equally if not more examples of non-Indians who submit bogus issues & PRs yet we target a certain groups.

-MB