- what we read
- 200 pull requests on GitHub, opened 22 Oct 2025 – 13 Sep 2026.
- the team and outside contributors
- 11 of them came from 1 person on the project's team and are left out. The team is everyone GitHub shows as an owner, member or collaborator, plus anyone the history shows merging, closing or formally reviewing other people's pull requests. Everyone else is an outside contributor, including people who come back.
- bots
- No pull requests were opened by bots. Only a maintainer's reply counts as a reply: not a bot, a CLA check, the author, or a passer-by.
- drafts and spam
- 18 pull requests from outside contributors were drafts or were labelled as spam or invalid, so they aren't counted anywhere.
- closed without a word
- 99 pull requests from outside contributors were closed without a reply. That's often how maintainers clear out spam, so they aren't counted as ignored.
- what decided it
- 5 pull requests from outside contributors were merged, by 4 different people, out of 171 attempts by 147 people. Of those who got a reply, half heard back within 42 minutes. Only 5 of 171 pull requests from outside contributors were merged, about 1 in 34. Most outside work here is never merged, so yours would be a long shot.
- the rule
- Only pull requests from outside contributors opened between 14 days and a year ago count, so each has had time for an answer and reflects how the project works now. “Worth your time” needs at least 2 of them merged, from at least 2 different people, with at least 3 in 10 people getting their first pull request merged (once 8 or more have tried), at least 1 in 10 merged, no more than half left without any reply, a typical first reply within 3 weeks, and people actually reviewing what gets merged. “Long shot” is a project that merges some outside work but misses one of those: fewer than 3 in 10 newcomers getting in, fewer than 1 in 10 merged, most left unanswered, very slow first replies, or only one person's work getting in. “Not worth your time” is an archived repository, a mirror, a project with nothing merged or pushed in 90 days, merges nobody reviews, fewer than 1 in 20 outside pull requests merged once at least 20 have been decided, or outside pull requests that are almost all ignored. “Personal project” is someone's own project or a small team's, like a hackathon entry, with nothing from outside ever merged. “A list, not code” is a list or a catalogue of entries, like links or package listings, where a merged entry isn't code work. Anything in between is “Not enough evidence”. These rules are fixed; no AI chooses the verdict.
- what Holt couldn't check
- No AI read the conversations for this report, so it doesn't say how maintainers talk to newcomers or what kind of project this is. The verdict and the numbers are counted straight from GitHub and don't need an AI.
