Open-source software (OSS) projects rely on effective newcomer onboarding to sustain their communities. OSS projects widely adopt "good first issue" (GFI) labels to highlight beginner-friendly tasks. As development practices continue to evolve, understanding how these onboarding mechanisms change over time is important for both maintainers and researchers. This study analyzes 406,826 issues and 1,117 newcomer GFI pull requests across 37 popular GitHub repositories (30 of which use GFI labels) over a four-year period from July 2021 to June 2025. We find that while the proportion of issues with GFI labels remained stable during the first three years, it underwent a statistically significant decline beginning in January 2024, with substantial variation across projects not explained by repository age or programming language. Despite this supply-side decline, newcomer engagement with GFI issues remains stable at approximately 27%, suggesting that GFI labels maintain consistent attractiveness. Examining the outcomes of this engagement, we find that the merge rate of newcomer GFI pull requests declined from 61.9% to 42.2%. Initial pull request characteristics such as description length and code size show no significant association with merge outcomes, indicating that success is not predicted by the quantitative characteristics of the initial submission alone. Together, these findings reveal a widening gap between stable newcomer interest in GFIs and the declining availability and success of GFI-based onboarding, underscoring the need for maintainers to sustain both GFI labeling and review support.

翻译：开源软件项目依赖有效的新贡献者融入机制来维持社区活力。这些项目广泛采用“良好入门问题”标签来标识适合初学者的任务。随着开发实践的持续演进，理解这些融入机制如何随时间变化对维护者和研究人员都至关重要。本研究分析了2021年7月至2025年6月四年间37个热门GitHub仓库（其中30个使用GFI标签）中的406,826个问题及1,117份新贡献者GFI拉取请求。研究发现，尽管GFI标签问题在前三年保持稳定比例，但自2024年1月起出现了具有统计显著性的下降，且不同项目间差异显著，无法由仓库年龄或编程语言解释。尽管供应端下降，新贡献者对GFI问题的参与度仍稳定在约27%，表明GFI标签保持持续吸引力。考察参与结果时发现，新贡献者GFI拉取请求的合并率从61.9%下降至42.2%。初始拉取请求特征（如描述长度和代码规模）与合并结果无显著关联，表明成功与否不能仅通过初始提交的定量特征预测。这些发现揭示了新贡献者对GFI的稳定兴趣与基于GFI的融入机制可用性及成功率下降之间的差距日益扩大，凸显维护者需要同时维持GFI标签标注与审查支持。