Why I close pull requests
Also, don’t send requests out of the blue.  The original maintainer has to know that you’re working on something.  One reason is that your changes might collide spectacularly with other planned changes you weren’t aware of.  Another reason is that the maintainer might say “no” to the entire <i>idea</i>, much less the implementation, and save you time.<p>The mere <i>creation</i> of a fork isn’t a sufficient signal, either; the project maintainer isn’t going to treat that as a sign that you’re actually working on something.  (There seem to be an insane number of forks out there that are created and never changed again, apparently used to pad résumés by having important-sounding projects listed on user profiles.)