Code of Conduct

Open source doesn't mean "anything goes". Be respectful, or be gone.

Anti AI Spam Policy

OpenWISP welcomes meaningful contributions from people who take the time to understand the project, the problem they are trying to solve, and the impact of their changes.

Contributions which shift the burden of understanding, implementation, testing, and review entirely onto maintainers are harmful to the project. This includes AI abuse: using AI coding agents, chatbots, or other automation to generate issues or pull requests without adequate human understanding, verification, and testing.

AI tools do not turn an inexperienced person into an experienced software developer. Contributors are responsible for understanding the project, the issue, and every change they submit. If a contributor cannot explain, maintain, and properly test the code they are proposing, they should not open a pull request.

The same applies to issues. Opening AI-generated issues based on superficial code smells, automated scans, or generic suggestions without real project understanding or user impact creates noise and wastes maintainer time. Artificial workflows in which a contributor uses AI to find a minor or questionable issue, opens it, and immediately opens a pull request for it are considered spam when they provide little or no value to the project.

Maintainers reserve the right to close issues and pull requests considered spammy or harmful to the project, including but not limited to:

  • issues generated by AI tools or automation without real user impact, project understanding, or meaningful investigation;

  • artificial issue-to-pull-request workflows created mainly to score contributions rather than solve a validated project need;

  • unsolicited pull requests which do not have a related issue;

  • pull requests targeting issues which have not been opened, acknowledged, or validated by maintainers;

  • pull requests with poor, incomplete, or untested implementations;

  • pull requests generated by AI tools or automation without enough human understanding, review, and testing;

  • pull requests with repeated pushes over a short period of time, repeated failed CI builds, or excessive automated review activity which wastes maintainer time and consumes the limited CI and review tool credits sponsored to the project. If these costs grow too much, sponsored services may run out or stop being available to OpenWISP;

  • pull requests which show little or no evidence that the contributor understands the project, the issue, or the proposed solution.

Maintainers may temporarily limit contributions from contributors who violate this policy. Contributors who continue violating this policy after a temporary restriction may be banned permanently.

When an issue, pull request, or contribution is closed under this policy, maintainers may provide only a link to this policy as the explanation.