We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

A GitHub repository was overwhelmed by low-quality AI-generated comments, pull requests, and issues that drowned out legitimate contributors, prompting the team to implement strict access controls. They discovered that GitHub's "prior contributor" setting could be bypassed using Git's `--author` flag with noreply emails, which they used to whitelist only approved contributors and lock out AI bots and spam accounts. The team prioritized quality contributions over metrics, implementing a five-step onboarding process to ensure their open-source project remained accessible to genuine developers rather than becoming flooded with AI-generated content.