For the longest time i've been going around closing github pull requests when created against moodle because we can't merge there (since it is a readonly mirror of git.moodle.org). I have tried contacting github support about the idea that they might disable pull requests, but I don't really expect them to enable that functonality any time soon, since I suppose its half the point of it being a sort of centralised network.

Anyway, we don't get bazillions of the pull requests, and when we do, I usually have a look at this issue, see if its associated with a MDL issue, and push it for peer review if so. But its a bit annoying manual work and I strongly feel that we should make sure that we cater for where the majority of developers already are... and try and be helpful. We can do that by responding quickly and sending the developer to the right place

So, based on coming across https://github.com/indutny/caine/blob/master/README.md my idea is that we could introduce a bot for dealing with github automatically.

Things it could do in order of fancyness:

1. Auto close pull requests, pointing the developer towards the tracker and helpful info about how to get patch merged
2. Get the developer to identify the issue the pull request this is related to
3. Detect if in fact its a pull request related to an existing tracker issue and set the appropiate fields/request peer review on that isuse
4. Pre-check the pull request and or/transform it into a MDL issue

On a related note, we should create a contributing file:
https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines
Unfortunately at the moment its a little bit opaque for newcomers.

Final related interesting POV: http://danluu.com/discourage-oss/