Co-maintainers added without notification or permissions

To look into this, we need to know which modules you're referring to.

https://www.drupal.org/project/purge_users →
https://www.drupal.org/project/backup_permissions →
https://www.drupal.org/project/module_export →

It is correct that co-maintainers/maintainers were added to these three projects. It is not correct that it was done without notification or permission. Here is a overview, with links to the relevant issues:

• Auto Purge Users → - Anybody was added as co-maintainer on 2023-05-09 by you. See comment #9 in: 💬 Offering to maintain Auto Purge Users Fixed
• Backup Permissions → - geoanders was added as maintainer on 2022-08-09 by a site moderator. See #3237949: Offering to maintain Backup Permissions →
• Module Export → - bbu23 was added as maintainer on 2023-10-11 by a site moderator. See [ #3237628: Offering to maintain Module Export →

In the case of Auto Purge Users, you yourself added Anybody as co-maintainer.

In the two other projects, a maintainer was added by a site moderator, who has permission from the Drupal Association to add maintainers to projects with in-active maintainers in certain circumstances. If you read the issue summary, you will see that the notice about opening up the project for adding new maintainers were posted in the project's issue queue on 2021-09-20, and stayed there for you to act on until somebody offered to maintain and requested the help of the site moderators to be added as maintainer. When the issue were opened, you were also sent a PM alerting about the issue. You had at any time the opportunity to prevent new maintainers from being added without your approval, simply by closing the issue (as stipulated in issue summary).

I think it is unfair for you to accuse those offering to maintain of " trying to hijack projects with the help of a moderator". These people offered to help upgrading the project to compatibility with newer versions of Drupal because you yourself had neglected to do so. It is also clear that you didn't monitor the project's issue queue for two years since the issue were opened in September 2021 and until today. Because of this, I think there were reasonable grounds for the site moderators to believe that you had abandoned your projects here, and new moderators were needed to let those depending on these projects continue using them on their websites.

I hope this clears up the matter. If you have further questions, please don't hesitate asking them.

In those issues automatically added, the issue summary says:

This is an adaptation of our existing process for transferring project maintainership.

After the standard 14-day waiting period from this issue being opened, and if an existing maintainer has not closed it, this project becomes eligible for new maintainers. Those new maintainers will not need to wait for existing maintainer approval.

The last sentence means that project maintainers will not be contacted by site moderators.

Ok, I apologize for the badly worded initial statement and stand corrected. However, I did not receive any notifications on:
https://www.drupal.org/project/backup_permissions →
or https://www.drupal.org/project/module_export →

Thank you for your time.

Jim

As already stated by apadermo, the issue summary states clearly that project maintainers will not be contacted by site moderators (prior to adding new maintainers). So you should have to expectation of being notified.

However, the initial notification was in plain sight the issue queue of your project for you to act upon. But you chose to ignore it.