Stars don't review pull requests
The state of open-source black holes: how often a stranger's pull request goes unanswered, in the Porchlamp snapshot of 10 November 2026.
You send a small fix to a project you use every day. Two weeks later, nobody has replied.
Key findings
More stars, more silence.
The share rises with stars: 10% of projects with 1,000 to 10,000 stars, 16% at 10,000 to 50,000, and 16% at 50,000 or more.
Fame is no guarantee.
17 of the 100 most-starred projects are black holes, and only 10 of them reach Porchlamp's top 100.
Stars barely predict an answer.
Across 4,044 ranked projects, the rank correlation between stars and the Porchlamp score is 0.06.
Most of those pull requests waited.
Inside the black-hole projects, 43,523 of 54,344 counted outside pull requests got no human reply within 14 days.
Do popular projects answer fewer pull requests?
They answer less often, on average. The black-hole share climbs at every step up in stars.
Not charted: 1 judged project with fewer than 1,000 stars.
One likely reason: review time stays roughly fixed while attention grows, so the queue grows faster than volunteers can clear it. The data shows the rise, not its cause.
Which package ecosystems answer outside pull requests?
Python and JavaScript projects go quiet more often than Rust, Go, Java or C and C++ projects. Each share is computed within its own ecosystem.
Size is not controlled for. Bigger projects go quiet more often in general, so part of a gap can come from size.
How we measured
- We followed 1,726,942 pull requests from 268,211 outside contributors to 11,000 GitHub projects, from 27 April to 24 October 2026.
- A project is judged only when it is licensed, maintained software with at least 10 counted outside pull requests.
- Another 3 licensed, maintained projects with at least 10 outside pull requests on record are not judged yet: those records were fetched before drafts and closes were recorded, and the rules need both.
- We could not judge 1 busy project yet: we hold only its newest 500 pull requests, and they do not reach back to 27 April.
- 302 projects had more than 2,000 pull requests in that time. For each, we read replies and reviews on an even random sample of 1,000 of them; every pull request counts for decisions and merges.
- It is a black hole when, with 95% confidence, more than half of those pull requests got no substantive reply, review, merge or close within 14 days or since.
- Bots, drafts, pull requests their authors closed, brand-new accounts and the project's own members are not counted. A comment an automated tool posts under a person's account, the same words on many pull requests within a minute of each opening, is not a reply.
- Every parameter, gate and weight: Porchlamp methodology.
What this is not
- Not a verdict on the people who maintain these projects. Review time is scarce, and popular projects receive far more pull requests than anyone can read.
- GitHub only. Projects that review on Gerrit or a mailing list are left undecided, not failed.
- One six-month window. The numbers will change at the next snapshot.
- This page names no project. Each project's record, with the pull requests behind it, is on the Porchlamp rankings.
Download the data
porchlamp-2026-11-10-ranked.csv: the 4,044 ranked projects with rank, owner, name, ecosystem, score, tier, coverage, quadrant and the rank in each lens. Released under CC BY 4.0.
The full records, including every project that was not ranked and why, are in the site's JSON data.
Cite this report
Porchlamp (2026). Stars don't review pull requests: the state of open-source black holes. Snapshot 2026-11-10. https://porchlamp.org/black-holes/2026-11-10/
Data licence: CC BY 4.0. Snapshot database SHA-256: f7b606d89d6efca960373059b264097b179d73e662cca15ff48cf626fb039a24. Methodology constants hash: 44b11850f0a20c3489cef53d2582215c4a6c17d35867f65a8c62067d16ca91cf.