FWIW I thought of another "open source" community which uses a similar idea to closing pull requests if they won't be accepted in their current form: Stack Exchange.
I mostly frequent Physics Stack Exchange <http://physics.stackexchange.com/>. At any time some number of the questions on the front page are either "closed" or "on hold" for not living up to site standards in some way. We've asked almost exactly the same question as is being asked in this thread: does closing unfit questions discourage new users so much as to outweigh the benefits to site quality? I won't pretend to have an authoritative answer to this question, but I will mention the steps we've taken to help make sure new users aren't put off. 1. We have a help center (like all other Stack Exchange sites) explaining the rules and system. It's not great though, and its shortcomings show up all the time as new users do get confused about the rules. I think if anything this is just an indication that contributing guidelines need to be really clear about what the various signals from the maintainers mean. 2. It's really helpful to leave a comment on unfit questions explaining what the problem is and *how the poster can improve it*. Stack Exchange has canned close reasons, but they're rarely sufficient in my opinion. I leave comments like "Welcome to Physics Stack Exchange! I think there's an interesting question here but we have some rules...Please see the [help center](link)...". Starting the comment with something positive and directing the user to official guidelines seems rather helpful, although I can't provide metrics. 3. Our chat room is extremely easy to access and people there are friendly. IRC is great but I just clicked around the Twisted website for a minute and couldn't find any indication that the twisted IRC channel exists.
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