[voakbasda]

When I want to contribute to an open source project, I throw together some trivial but useful patches and see how the project responds.

Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment.

Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors.

It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.

[mort96]

This is probably the best approach.

I submitted a patch to Go once, and never got anything resembling a response. Told me that Go is more or less completely inaccessible; I should treat it as a Google product rather than a FOSS project I can contribute to. The Go standard library documentation bug I submitted a fix to still exists to this day.

[the_biot]

This is the way. I disagree with your 24-hour timeline -- give it a week -- but whether and how they respond tells you a lot. Being welcoming to new contributors is crucial for the health of a project.

One time I was interested in contributing to an important part of some project, a part where they were nowhere and in dire need of help. As a first try I submitted a small patch correcting the README's build instructions, which were obviously wrong in one place. I got a lot of attitude and hostility, and they refused to accept the fix. Yeah, bye.

[esafak]

Absolutely. I look at the commit and PR history. Are the maintainers responsive and welcoming?

[IshKebab]

Have you found this actually works? I wouldn't be surprised if many projects happily accept trivial PRs (because they're easy to deal with) but then ignore or naysay anything more substantial.

[Brian_K_White]

The point is only 50% to see if they respond, it's also to start establishing yourself as a known entity to them.

They will ignore a big patch from a rando and obviously process a big patch from themselves.

You can become somehwere in between and no longer be a rando, but have to start from the rando end.