This is my first time encountering an open-source project that deliberately blocks pull request contributions from users who can read the code, follow the guidelines, and are willing to contribute legitimate improvements.
This move is unacceptable and shows that the project and its community are not welcoming to outsiders. It is incredibly sarcastic that the CONTRIBUTING.md concludes with: “Thanks for being an open source contributor. Let us know how to send you a cup of coffee!”
It means you don’t have write permissions to push branches and make PR’s from the main repo. We don’t just hand that out indiscriminately. You can make PR’s from your own fork. Just to add… we are all subject to review by another maintainer… nobody gets to just merge a PR on their own.
It seems that it’s what @mlouielu is trying to do.
You definitely should have the possibility to create a PR on the main repo from your fork as it used to be the case. There must have been an unintentional configuration error.
@Sue could you check, please ?
We should allow PR from all users, but only alow collaborators to merge them after a review.
No. It only shows that the project is maintained on a volunteer basis by a very small group of people who are doing their best, and who must have made a mistake while trying to configure the repository permissions. The project isn’t exactly flooded with contributions—you were the first to point that out, so thank you. A little understanding would be appreciated, though. We would have solved the problem for you if you had brought the issue to our attention.
It seems like @mlouielu is trying to compare changes on the main repo page not making a PR from thier page.
Well that would have had to have happened in the past 2 days as there are already 2 pending PR’s of @mlouielu waiting for requested changes. I know I have not changed any settings on the repo. 
I just checked.. None of the limits are enabled anyway.
The only limit is that just Seamly collaborators can write to the base for which I don’t have access to view or give write permissions for.
Agreed… but IMO contributors should also not just start creating PR’s out of the blue without introducing themselves. That’s kinda why collaborators have to be invited to join.
My Bad! Thanks @Mlouislu for bringing this to our attention.
@Mlouielu Our community is typically very polite and communicative. On the off times when someone is cranky or makes a mistake, we don’t take offense and we talk it out to find a solution, as we are all human. In future, if you discern a problem you could kindly ask about it to find out what can be done to fix it. Also, create an issue then conduct discussions with the dev team.
So what was the issue… and solution?
Thanks for BDFL @Sue and other core devs swiftly addressed the issue, I can create PR on GitHub again.
As for @Douglas, I totally understand that you don’t know how Git works.
Able to merge doesn’t mean that I can directly merge into FashionFreedom/Seamly2D:develop from mlouielu/Seamly2D:add-top-right-offset-for-tooltip, it merely means that "If someone accepted the pull request (which means someone with the ability to merge/rebase mlouielu/Seamly2D:add-top-right-offset-for-tooltip to FashionFreedom/Seamly2D:develop, there is no additional code confliction needs to address. But before that, I need to at least create the PR to the base repository.
The reason I brought this up with sharp tone is because, @Douglas kept having unwelcoming tone more and more when I raised legit UI/UX suggestions that I encountered in my newbie phase:
Questioning whether I use Seamly2D:
And the last straw, I was having new user limit for post/reply at the time, before I post Add tooltip offset to top right, I think this kind of small PR is fine to just create a PR first and then post it to the forum. Then I realized that I can’t create the PR anymore (hint: this was the issue).
I totally understand that open-source project is volunteered and people are strive to work on it, I am an open-source developer, too. But In this situation, especially I had created 2 PRs 2-3 days ago before this happened, it was hard not to think the community is unwelcoming to new contributions.
Again, thanks for addressing this issue swiftly.
Solution: I reset the repo settings back to allowing anyone to create a pull request. Restricting pull requests to the dev team is a GitHub setting that is now highly recommended by GitHub Maintainers, due to poor quality AI-vibe-coded pull-requests popping up across the open source sphere. The assumption is that new contributors are welcomed to the dev team, and their PR is then accepted, reviewed, and merged.
I believed incorrectly that the setting would allow anyone to create a feature branch without automatically creating a pull request. which would allow discussion about code styles, etc. before a pull request is created.
The recommended approach to achieve our goals is to ask new contributors to create Draft Pull Requests to allow better communication with current devs. We do ask new contributors when creating new issues to discuss the problem on the forum before creating a GH issue, but there isn’t a similar notification opportunity to notify new contributors to create Draft Pull Requests.
So here we are, same as before.
At least we actually respond quickly and try to be helpful, unlike many open source projects where issues are ignored until closed a year later and pull requests are closed with a simple comment “won’t implement”. 
So kudos to everyone for handling the recent flurry of chaos without burning down the house. Well done 
And I might remind everyone that implying poor behavior on some other person’s part seems to reflect pre-existing personal bias rather than current actions and behaviors. So please no more snarky or cranky responses. We’ve all seen enough. Let us return to polite discourse and thinking the best of everyone. No more “shoot first, ask questions later”. This approach can be rather tedious and draining, and it keeps the focus off of the objective work and onto subjective evaluation of personalities.
