[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.