I remember a project called OpenChaos where people voted on a pull request each day, and the winning change was merged into a website. The repository now returns a 404 on GitHub. Did the project simply lose momentum, or was it taken down after someone submitted and approved a harmful change?
2 Answers
From what I remember, the project was eventually disrupted when participants voted for a malicious or destructive change. Since the whole idea involved letting strangers influence what got merged, someone apparently used that opportunity to break the project or gain more access than intended. The repository may have been removed afterward, although the exact exploit is hard to confirm.
I vaguely remember hearing that an exploit or intentionally destructive pull request was approved by the vote and caused the project to fail. I don’t recall the technical details, so it may not have been a simple case of the project gradually becoming inactive.
That makes sense. The voting concept was entertaining, but it probably needed strict limits on changes that could affect permissions, deployment, or delete important files. A safer second version could keep the same idea while isolating the submitted code.