On Sat, 15 Aug 2020 at 18:53, John Hawkinson <jhawk@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

You can create a template that explains to a would-be pull request submitter than pull requests will be closed and the project uses the mailing list for development discussions.

Indeed, that was my explicit intent behind suggesting a CONTRIBUTING file in August 2014, but it seems Github has since deprioritized how it displays this to would-be-first-time-contributors.

https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/setting-guidelines-for-repository-contributors#adding-a-contributing-file

One could argue that the mere presence of a CONTRIBUTING should require new contributors to check a box acknowledging that they understand the project's guidelines — which in our case explicitly says "don't do this" — but alas, this isn't the case.

--
Tim Parenti