Below is an email I received in December 2024, but this is just one example of various encounters I’ve had where students have been led to contribute to the project by their tutor. I don’t mind spending time to help assisting contributions from those that have a genuine interest in the project, as that can help foster a longer term contributor relationship which is healthy for the project overall, but these contributions are often done with the core intent of passing course requirements.

Their Email

Hello Mr. Brown,

I am studying software engineering at <UNIVERSITY NAME REMOVED>. Your BookStackApp project was assigned as a project for my Software Architecture course. We were asked to suggest architectural changes that would increase the scalability of the project. We wanted to meet with you because you rejected our last pull request. We would be very happy if you could help us with the architectural changes and provide feedback.

Best regards Have a nice day

My Response

Hi <NAME_REMOVED>,

Sorry I rejected your pull request. The problem is though, if you’re providing/offering changes, with the expectation of them being merged/included, with the main aim of passing/progressing a course, then that’s contributing under the wrong motivations.

Architecture and scalability are quite high-level concerns, and as a decade-old & stability-focused project such as BookStack, these aren’t topics which would have or need direct contributions provided by fly-by contributions that don’t have prior context or deeper experience/understanding of our goals & scope.

Lastly, I did not consent nor agree for my project to be used within your course, and I’m not keen on spending time discussing or integrating change for the sake of change, or for a University course. If there’s a specific thing to address, which is an actual issue, I’m happy to hear back from our community members on that, but I’m not going to change architectural or scope decisions based upon an assignment we did not agree to be part of.

I’m often happy to spend the time needed to support less experienced developers in helping contribute, but only where they’re happy to match effort for that, and where they have an ongoing active interest in the project.

Regards, Dan