GitHub is the home of open source, a place for collaboration, and a professional portfolio for millions of developers. However, the platform is increasingly being degraded by low-effort spam accounts and "engagement farmers."

We are seeing a massive influx of user accounts that follow other developers with no genuine intent to collaborate or follow their work. Instead, these accounts exist solely to solicit stars and falsely inflate engagement metrics.

These spam accounts are easily recognizable by humans, yet they persist on the platform. Common characteristics include:

• Mass Following: Following thousands of users while having zero public contributions or repositories of value.
• Solicitation Bios: User descriptions that explicitly ask for "Star for Star" or similar engagement farming schemes.
  • Example: "GIVE ME STARS TO MY REPOSITORIES AND BACK TO YOUR REPOSITORIES 🧩"
• Irrelevant Activity: Stars and follows are distributed randomly, seemingly via scripts, rather than based on technology stacks or genuine interest.

1. Notification Fatigue: legitimate notifications are buried under waves of spam follows, making it harder for maintainers to see genuine interactions.
2. Reputation Degradation: "Star for Star" schemes devalue the GitHub Star as a metric of project quality and community interest.
3. Platform Health: Allowing blatant spam bots to roam free lowers the overall quality of the GitHub network and encourages abusive behavior.

We call on GitHub (Microsoft) to implement stricter detection and removal policies for these spam accounts.

Specifically, we request:

1. Automated Detection: Better heuristics to flag accounts that follow thousands of users in short timeframes without corresponding contributions.
2. Bio Scanning: Automated flagging of profiles containing obvious spam keywords like "give me stars" or "star back."
3. Reporting Mechanisms: A specific reporting category for "Spam Following" or "Engagement Farming" on user profiles.

If you agree that this behavior has no place on GitHub, please help raise awareness:

1. ⭐ Star this repository to show your support for this petition.
2. Share this repository with other developers and GitHub staff.
3. Block and Report these accounts whenever you see them.