Hacktoberfest spam

[Samuel Lelievre]

What is Hacktoberfest

A cloud provider called DigitalOcean [0] organises an event called

Hacktoberfest [1], presented as an encouragement to all to contribute

to open-source software, in which that company offers 70,000 t-shirts

to people sending pull requests to GitHub-hosted Git repositories

of open source projects.

This results in a flood of low-quality few-character pull requests,

especially on website repositories, despite the warnings against

that in the detailed rules of Hactoberfest [2], which many T-shirt

hunters likely don't bother to read or take into consideration.

I'm not sure how to best deal with that:

[a] write a polite message to each such "eager contributor"

    reminding them that the detailed hacktoberfest rules discourage

    such anti-contributions

[b] use a pull request template with such a warning,

    and warn that abuse will be reported as spam

    and thus disqualify their authors to get any hacktoberfest rewards

[c] shut down the pull requests mechanism for the whole of October

Other ideas? Good luck to all GitHub-hosted repository maintainers.

Maybe this will encourage a massive migration to GitLab.

Here is a possible polite message to copy-paste if we choose that.

"""

Hacktoberfest spam? If this is for Hacktoberfest, please read their

detailed rules carefully. They encourage meaningful contributions

and discourage this type of pull request with no clear added value

and whose only purpose seems to be to increase your "score".

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details

"""

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalOcean

[1] https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com

[2] https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 2020-10-01 04:29, Samuel Lelievre wrote:
>
> I'm not sure how to best deal with that:
>

> [a] ...
>

[d] change our github email address to postm...@digitalocean.com

(how many real pull requests do we get?)

[Tobia...@gmx.de]

Just handle the PRs as would handle them normally. If these small PRs improve something, simply merge them; if not close them saying why. Although there are definitely people that just want to get a Tshirt (or other swag), one should keep in mind that the idea of the hacktoberfest is to get new people contributing code (or documentation etc). So better error on the polite side and treat them as somebody that just opened their first PR in their life.

Good PRs can be labeled by hacktoberfest-accepted so that they actually count towards the tshirt (this is a recent rule change, probably because there was even more spam than in the previous years).

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#details