I received a comment on GitHub issue, and I marked it as a spam. The author of the comment complained, and while responding to this, I thought that writing it as a blog post would help the entire OSS community

github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/3365#issu..

I am using swc core version 1.3.70, and I am still facing the issue that browserslistrc file is not read if we omit the env.target options. I am not sure why moderators felt that my previous comment was a spam. I am just interested to know if some work has been done for this issue. It's my humble request to moderators to rather close this ticket if you don't want any further threads. Simply marking the comment as a spam is serious and does not reflect good will. My comment did not contain any bad messages.

I marked it as spam because it's spam. I didn't choose Abuse. I chose Spam. No one thinks your comment contains a bad message.

It's spam because it

• does not add any value to the issue.
• sends an email to all subscribers.
• disturbs future readers (most serious).

I'll talk about these in order.

Not adding any value

You may think you are shedding light to a forgotten issue. But many OSS maintainers are already using enormous amount of time for their projects. They are already aware of the issue. They just decided to work on other issues first. I know, everyone thinks their issue is the most important. But if you are serious, you are seriously wrong. Everything is cost-benefit tradeoff. They are not working on your issue not because they don't know about it, but because they think there's a task with higher priority considering the cost and the benefit, or cost of fixing it is too high. If you have little experience, it's too likely to be mistaken, so I'll add. The cost here is not restricted to time or money. It also includes the cost for future maintenance. I hope you don't feel bad when I say you're going to misunderstand. I was under the same illusion, and now there are a lot of problems with SWC. I added lots of features without carefully considering the cost of maintenance, just because it was easy to implement.

Sending an email

This is a story before putting down SWC and open source a little mentally.

I was under a lot of stress when I got email for those comments. It's not because the comment itself or the email itself is annoying. What I really cared about was Watchers.

GitHub Star? Yeah, it matters. OSS is almost always about motivation. It's a kind of motivation. But Star is one-off, and many stars on the project does not mean a project is going well.

Watcher is a bit different. It's not one-off. Watchers receives emails for project updates. The person who watches the project is much more likely to help than a user of the project or someone pressed the star. The number of Watchers is much more motivating than the number of stars. When I was younger and I was emotionally tied to SWC, I checked if the number of Watchers decreased when such comments were posted. I couldn't put it down mentally until there were quite a lot of donations and people who contributed often.

So, at least to maintainers like me of the past, you are actively disturbing project. For maintainers like me at this point, it's simply another task. I have to read it, see if it contains anything useful, and mark it as a spam if it's useless. The reason why I cannot simply ignore it is written in the next paragraph.

Disturbing future readers

Did you ever read an OSS issue thoughtfully which has been remained open for a very long time and has an enormous amount of comments?

Comments like

• Is there any update?
• I have same issue.

really disturb reading and always, those comments have wasted a lot of my time.

It's not a matter of emotion. I know, I wasted time because I'm not native English speaker. When I read Korean posts, I can get off without much time even if there are so many comments like that. But most of people are not native English speaker. Polite speaking doesn't mean it's not problematic to others. I can't read English as comfortably as you. I've always been told I have a talent for languages. I won many awards at Korean writing competitions and so many Korean (language) teachers asked me if I wanted to be a literary writer. But it's Korean, and English is different, even for a someone talented in languages. Including me, most people can't read English that easily.

If there was any update, maintainers may have closed the issue. Of course, there are some cases that maintainers don't close the issue even if there was an update. But you know, it's still occurring and you even faced it (badly).

Conclusion

So please, do not leave comments like them. I know you may feel this post offensive, but I just want you to remember the reasons. Also, please read github.com/bradfitz/issue-tracker-behaviors.

P.S.

I don't have much feelings right now. I gave up a lot about OSS because I was so stressed out by open source. But for me, it's already in the past. That's why I can write a post like this. In the past, I would have responded emotionally, and I wouldn't have thought the same thing about writing something that would help others.