PSA: Ghosting hurts CRSF for Arduino's development

[ZZ-Cat]

What is ghosting?

"Ghosting" is defined in my Contribution Guidelines as a situation where I have not heard back from someone over a significant amount of time.

Ghosting hurts CRSF for Arduino's development

Ghosting hurts CRSF for Arduino's development in the following ways:

1. Misinformation attempts to fill the void where information is either lacking or non-existent.
   However, misinformation can never fill that void, because the only thing what can refute information is more information. This is especially true if you are not available to provide further information on your Issue, upon request.
   Misinformation includes assumptions, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding the message(s) you are trying to convey.
2. Maladapted enhancements and bug fixes.
3. Hardware testing is either lacking or non-existent.
   This non-existent hardware testing frequently makes it into public releases, leading to stability issues in-practice.
   This compounds when someone tells me "this is not working" and then ghosts me, when I ask for their assistance for testing on the hardware they are having performance/stability issues with.
4. Assumptions are made on all sides about what someone wants, and what someone can/can't do.
5. Stalled development.
6. Untested and/or incomplete Pull Requests being merged into the Main-Trunk and making it into supposedly "stable" public releases.

Further mitigation is required

For a start, I am enforcing my existing rules, regarding ghosting.
However, I am no longer merging ghost Pull Requests on a case-by-case basis.
I now have sufficient evidence supporting how bad doing this actually is - It causes a decline in the overall quality of CRSF for Arduino. Thus, taking away from my "quality over quantity" approach to writing the code-base.

As of 2023-4-25, 0900 Hrs NZST, all ghost Pull Requests are rejected, and all ghost Issues are closed and marked as "unplanned".
#107 is the last ghost Pull Request I am merging into the Main-Trunk. Afterwards, all future ghost Pull Requests and ghost Issues are rejected and closed, respectively.

I need people to be available for things like providing further information in their Issues, and to provide local testing of their hardware to ensure that the code being introduced by its associated branch-and-Pull-Request combo works as intended, and to help resolve any problems that may come up during development.

CRSF for Arduino is a community-driven project

I am the sole developer and maintainer of CRSF for Arduino.
CRSF for Arduino itself is theoretically compatible with 157 development boards (and this number is set to increase, as I bring in more RP2040-based targets).
It is not feasible, let alone reasonable or realistic to expect me to build, flash, hardware test, debug, unit test, conduct static code analyses on, and vulnerability scan each and every individual development board on my own that CRSF for Arduino is theoretically compatible with... especially with every time an Issue is added to my development pipeline.
There is only so much that I, as an individual, can do.

It is more realistic for me to offload testing to you.
Which is why I rely heavily on you to test CRSF for Arduino on your development board(s) and help me refine the code-base when something is not working as it was intended.
You don't necessarily need to be a professional firmware developer, but I at least need you to be available for testing your bug-fix or feature request on your development board when I request your assistance.

The bottom line

If I receive no response from you for 14 consecutive days (or more) in your Issue and after I have requested more information regarding your issue, your issue will be closed and marked as "unplanned".

If I receive no response from you from 14 consecutive days (or more) in either your Pull Request, or a Pull Request I have created and tagged you in (usually because I am requesting your assistance), regardless of the state of the code in its associated branch, the Pull Request will be rejected. Any associated branches, where I am able, will be deleted.

I am updating my Contribution Guidelines to include this change to my Ghosting clause, under the "How I am combating it" section.

I need people that are willing to collaborate with me to help improve CRSF for Arduino.
What I don't need is someone submitting an Issue, and never interacting with me or my project ever again. This also applies to Pull Requests. You choose to get involved with CRSF for Arduino's development by submitting Issues and providing assistance in your Issue's linked Pull Request. Without you, this cannot happen.

Additional

Issues and Pull Requests closed and rejected respectively as a result of ghosting will display this label:

👻 Ghostbusted ❌ Your Issue/Pull Request is closed/rejected as a result of ghosting for 14 or more days