[To Maintainers] ✉️ A heartfelt plea and apology from the real Chinese developer community

[jiangmuran]

Dear Maintainers,

I am writing this message with a heavy heart, hoping it catches your eye amidst the frustrating flood of spam you are currently dealing with. First and foremost, I want to express my deepest gratitude for this amazing project. It has been incredibly helpful to me, and I have immense respect for the time, effort, and passion you dedicate to the open-source community.

It absolutely breaks my heart and makes me deeply ashamed to see your repository—a place of collaboration and creation—being maliciously vandalized by automated bot networks posting in Chinese about gambling, gray-market services, and other illegal activities.

The main reason I am writing to you today is to make a sincere, desperate plea: Please do not let these malicious bots tarnish your impression of the entire Chinese developer community.

These spam accounts are driven entirely by illegal profit motives. They use automated scripts to exploit and pollute open-source platforms without any regard for the damage they cause to creators like you. Please know that we, the real Chinese developers who use and love your project, hate these spammers just as much—if not more—than you do. We feel a profound sense of powerlessness and frustration seeing our native language weaponized to destroy the open-source environment we cherish.

We are a community that deeply values the open-source ethos, respects maintainers, and wants to contribute positively. It is our greatest fear that the selfish actions of these faceless, illegal botnets will build a wall of prejudice against genuine, well-meaning contributors from China.

Many of us are actively doing what we can by reporting these spam issues and accounts directly to GitHub. We know the notification fatigue and the cleanup work must be incredibly overwhelming and disheartening for you right now.

Please stay strong, and know that you have the silent but unwavering support of countless real developers from China. We stand with you against this vandalism, and we hope that once this storm passes, we can continue to be a welcomed part of your community.

Thank you for your patience, your hard work, and your understanding.

Sincerely,
A grateful and deeply apologetic developer from China

[jiangmuran]

#40026

[sirily11]

Really sad to see my most used social media platform being flooded with these spams.

[hotlif]

In fact, you can see this in almost any Android app in China. And it's not just the apps; even the smartphones themselves are flooded with a massive amount of junk content.

Back before HTTPS was everywhere, networks would actually intercept webpage code to inject ads. Even today, if you use a Chinese web browser, it will inject ads by default. That's just the reality of the situation, and there's really nothing we can do about it.