8 ms·

Spamtoberfest

144 points by als0 6y ago

pvg 6y ago
Story dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
- sixhobbits 6y ago
  It's similar but not a dupe
  - pvg 6y ago
    It's a dupe because that's how HN dupes work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24372326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24372326 The many hadith of dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20dupe&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - sixhobbits 6y ago
      interesting - still seems different to me. Those are about different news articles reporting on the same "event". These are two different (though similar) individual's experiences of Hacktoberfest.
      - pvg 6y ago
        I mean, you can finesse it a zillion different ways but it's the same story. You can tell it's the same story because you get the same kinds of comments. There's always someone who hasn't seen the story. There's always some slightly different take someone could write about the story. But if these aren't duped out, the front page would be the same five stories every day and complaints about how it's the same five stories. Just flag dupes and carry on!
zabardasth 6y ago
My manager mentioned Hacktoberfest a while back. Honestly I’d never heard of it. When I went to check it out, I was greeted with millions of commits of whitespace. Now I dream of the whitespace. I’ve learned to embrace the whitespace. And it’s fellow companions, the humble carriage return and line feed.
- akerro 6y ago
  i prefer 3 spaces intentation or tabs, please accept my RP
- onion2k 6y ago
  I didn't know whitespace[1] was popular on Github... ;) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
avolcano 6y ago
I suppose, as a DigitalOcean subscriber for the past five or so years, I should probably send them an angry email about this. I don't know if they'll be particularly threatened by me pulling my $12 a month, but maybe it'd at least get this noticed by some part of the org that isn't keeping up with engineering news...
- dkersten 6y ago
  I already contacted support and they sent me a “we’re working on it, here’s our response[1]” response, which I didn’t feel was good enough. I’d send them a support message to make it known that their customers are displeased about their actions. [1] https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update
  - dorian-graph 6y ago
    I've contacted support as well to express my disappointment.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Unless you make billing department notice, they aren't going to care.
- vsareto 6y ago
  I want to say just go spam PRs on the DO repos and maybe they'll do something about it. But totally don't do that because you read it here.
villgax 6y ago
Sadly the bulk of it all is Indians with spam. All for a T-shirt & some stickers for laptops. DigitalOcean better stop this ritual.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I think we can be annoyed with low quality spam without dragging whole nationalities under the bus.
  - villgax 6y ago
    Yeah true, but just look at the bulk https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
minxomat 6y ago
Youtube vids are telling people to spam to get free merch: https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944 https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944 DO is aware.
- bronson 6y ago
  > DO is aware and saying that they can’t do anything, that the project maintainers need to wade through the garbage and mark it spam. The maintainers don’t get anything for their additional work. Way to go DO.
edw 6y ago
Coming soon, if it's not already here in Preview Edition: Eternal Hacktober. Every day GitHub more resembles a gamified social media platform.
- akerro 6y ago
  Xorg foundation had something like that, I think they also paid for important works before GSoC - both of which have much higher entry level: X.Org Endless Vacation of Code https://www.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas/ https://www.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas/
jrockway 6y ago
People really seem to be looking for someone to blame here, but Github was always public and there was always the ability for any random person to inundate you with garbage pull requests. My experience maintaining open source projects is that most pull requests are more work to review (and coach) then they would be to just do from scratch yourself. But you're letting people contribute to something bigger than themselves, being a part of something. And, the first small request may lead to big improvements in the future. So maybe it's not all bad. It doesn't bother me that DigitalOcean is incentivizing people to contribute to open source. Yeah, they were pretty bad at it, but we were all bad at it at some point. Encouraging people to take that chance is valuable to me. (Some other comments mention sending DigitalOcean an angry email because they are customers. I'm a customer too! Maybe I'll send them a nice email.) Github could do some work to improve this. For example, they could add a feature that requires lint/tests to pass before the PR is even brought to the attention of a maintainer. That would be good even outside of Hacktoberfest; I have no doubt wasted a colleague's time pointing out a lint error that the linter would have pointed out a few minutes later (if I had not forgotten to run it). People get a chance to try out open source contribution. Github gets some ideas on how to improve their product. I'm just not all that angry.
- mathnmusic 6y ago
  Why would lint/tests fail when docs or README are sabotaged?
  - groundCode 6y ago
    Maybe people lint their docs or README with something like vale.
- acrispino 6y ago
  DO isn't some charity, and it's not their first go around. Dangling free stuff in front of people and then offloading the burden of spam mitigation on people who didn't ask for it is careless at best and arrogant at worst edit: I should also mention, I feel bad for the Community Platform Manager on twitter who can't really fix anything on his own but is still pained that people are unhappy. DO has dumped a bunch of crap on him too.
akerro 6y ago
Wow I saw this was bad last year, but this is terrorism https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311714154701443072/photo/1 https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311714154701443072/...
- LandR 6y ago
  OK, that's funny!
quadrifoliate 6y ago
> This is what we get with corporate-sponsored “social coding”, brought to you by Digital Ocean and GitHub and McDonalds, home of the Big Mac™. When you build the Facebook of coding, you get the Facebook of coding. The author has this spot on. Everyone who has ever emphasized things like "your commit graph" and metrics like "number of PRs opened", or who uses GitHub star count to judge a project's popularity is collectively responsible for this kind of problem. GitHub is a good tool, but its social aspect does not optimize for meaningful coding contributions, it optimizes for visibility. I agree with the author that sr.ht would likely avoid this problem since it's optimized for actual problems that programmers need to solve. That being said, I think there are two other factors at play here: 1. I had a lot of internal debate about whether or not to say this, but calling it out for what it is – there is a bit of latent racism inherent in this outcry. A lot of the people making the requests seem to be male and South Asian, and I think this triggers people's inbuilt resistance to South Asian names. They will fall over themselves to advise `alina_stravinsky599` on the best way to make a typofix, but will yell "shitoberfest!" when `navinshah53` makes the same PR. [1] 2. Digital Ocean seems to want to juice metrics and use Hacktoberfest as a PR marketing move, so they have no incentive to actually offer personal mentorship that can enable anyone to make meaningful contributions to Open Source. Their "Beginners" page (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#beginners https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#beginners) recycles generic information about making PRs. --------------------- [1] A personal, optional perspective regarding this: If you are a fellow South Asian man like me who actually wants to contribute to Open Source, remember that OSS maintainers will consider your PR as guilty until proven innocent. This is not fair, just like life. Your PRs need to be non-trivial, typo-free, and have perfectly passing tests. If you feel like submitting a simple PR to fix a typo or something, avoid the temptation and just leave it for others to participate in this feel-good fest. Consider spending that time writing closed-source code for money instead.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  > They will fall over themselves to advise `alina_stravinsky599` on the best way to make a typofix, but will yell "shitoberfest!" when `navinshah53` makes the same PR. Sorry, but stereotypes exist for a reason. South Asians (Indians) are very much over-represented in the "spam commit" category. And so, if people see this enough, they will build up a natural and understandable annoyance and resistance to future commits from such people.
j1elo 6y ago
What I'm surprised is that Hacktoberfest is opt-out, not opt-in, and it's enough to file a Pull Request, not needing for it to be accepted. There, two things that D.O. could change right now to limit the spam, instead of lying about having their hands tied.
- jakejarvis 6y ago
  > it's enough to file a Pull Request, not needing for it to be accepted This part never made any sense to me. Such an easy fix to make.
  - eXpl0it3r 6y ago
    There are a lot of projects that might not merge a PR within a month and the further you are into October the more unlikely it gets that the PR is merged in time. As such I do like it that my contributions to a project do count, even if the maintainer isn't around right now...
    - j1elo 6y ago
      I did think about it when writing the idea, and in the end it still looks to me that it would be worth it. This rule would mean contributors would actually care to initiate a conversation about their intented work, and would probably drive them towards projects where there is some activity and positive feedback from the maintainer, instead of projects which didn't want or ask for any contribution, like it happens now. Also, I think such constructive environment could drive a reasonable maintainer to help the contributors by fast-tracking the PR in case the end of October was approaching. And by taking into account the PR merge date, not the PR creation date, it would mean you as participant could start working on some PR even before October.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      DO could just check again for merged PRs whenever they want.
  - benibela 6y ago
systemvoltage 6y ago
Can someone explain how these spams are created? Who creates these (I know DO, but why do they create a bot to spam repos)? What is the alleged motivation behind these PRs? I am out of loop with this one.
- jayflux 6y ago
  It’s not bots, it’s hundreds or thousands of people doing the bare minimum to submit a pull request and get the t shirt
- tazjin 6y ago
  It's not DO who are creating the bots. People are doing this to get free t-shirts from DO, without having to actually make meaningful contributions.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    I was missing this piece of puzzle. It all makes sense now. Thank you. Wait... why the hell is DO giving out free t-shirts in automated fashion without checking individual contributions! What could go wrong!!!
- mathnmusic 6y ago
  Yesterday, this youtuber exhorted its viewers to submit at least 20 PRs in not-so-popular repos so that at least 4 remain unmarked as "invalid" to qualify for free t-shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas He has 670K subscribers on Youtube, and he insisted that not a single t-shirt should remain unclaimed after 1st October. Anger aside, it was DO's job to think of poor incentive alignments and loopholes, because at the Internet scale, every loophole gets exploited sooner or later. Maintainers have been telling them of the spam issue for years. For urgent action, DO should try to get that YouTuber to create a follow-up video to ask people to stop spamming Github. Even canceling the HacktoberFest and restarting it with new rules would be better than just giving up (as Matt Cowley seems to be indicating here: https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311594424049307649 https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311594424049307649 ) And eventually, invest in educating these new developers about a responsible way of participating in open-source.
triceratops 6y ago
Can we stop spamming HN with stories about Spamtoberfest? We get it, DO did a bad thing solely for their benefit. While we're on the topic, let's talk of ways Github can ease the load on OSS maintainers for the rest of the year too. Examples: 1. (someone else suggested) Mandatory to run linters or pass tests before sending a PR. 2. Vacation mode for repos, where all PRs are auto-declined, with a vacation auto-responder message. This is also good for maintainers' mental health. 3. Ability to whitelist contributors who are allowed to send PRs (this might be controversial and against the spirit of Open Source) 4. Ability to set a TTL on PRs per-repo. If an owner doesn't respond within the TTL, it's auto-closed. 5. Stop showing commit graphs and the other nonsense that turns committing code into a public performance. I'm sure there are other suggestions.
balloob 6y ago
> Let’s be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source. This statement by the author is not true. I lead Home Assistant[1], last year the 10th most active project on GitHub[2]. We love Hacktoberfest at Home Assistant and gladly participate. We have gotten a lot of high quality contributions and some of these contributors also stayed and joined our core team. We've been many years in the top contributed projects during Hacktoberfest. In earlier years spam was higher but now it's not too bad. The biggest thing that they did to reduce the spam to us was making sure our repository didn't get linked on their website. I see a bunch of calls of people are trying to stop Hacktoberfest because it attracts people to open source and we're all so busy. But… if we get more people and we get them along as a maintainer, the long term work load can be reduced because more people are working on open source. So instead of calls for trying to stop Hacktoberfest, let's ask for a better way to control spam. I think that the announced guide by DO to tell people to open a PR on their own repo is a good start. And if anyone reading this is interested in participating in Hacktoberfest by improving their smart home, check out the Home Assistant Hacktoberfest blogpost[3]! [1]: https://www.home-assistant.io https://www.home-assistant.io [2]: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects [3]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-2020/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-...
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  I see calls to make it opt in mainly. Including from the person who runs it for DO.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311391325443555328 https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311391325443555328
- corobo 6y ago
  > if we get more people and we get them along as a maintainer Big 'if' considering a majority of the spammy PRs I've seen today are editing the project's title to add "- An awesome project". It all feels very automated.
- petecoop 6y ago
  Thanks for commenting here, I use HA and I will contribute :)
j1elo 6y ago
So here is an community-wide project idea I just had: gather as many spam reports as possible, and build a training set that can be used next year to implent a Github Actions workflow to automatically reject Pull Requests based on a confidence threshold. Like a spam filter for PRs. Something like this: https://github.com/marketplace/issue-label-bot https://github.com/marketplace/issue-label-bot but assigning an "invalid" label and closing the PR. Maintainers might want to enable this only during October. It would be a cool reaction from the community, given that there is not much else we can do. The best place where to find training examples that I can think of is @shitoberfest on Twitter (https://twitter.com/shitoberfest https://twitter.com/shitoberfest), but most of them are just screenshots, not actual links :(
- avery42 6y ago
  Sounds like a lot of work to fix a company's marketing stunt.
  - j1elo 6y ago
    Turns out someone had a similar idea, simpler, but helpful and effective! https://github.com/marketplace/actions/check-and-reject-spam-prs https://github.com/marketplace/actions/check-and-reject-spam...
jimnotgym 6y ago
> Let’s be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source. That is a bold claim. Hacktoberfest being in the press reminded me how little I have been able to code in the last two years, and made me consider joining in FOSS again. There is a part of me that there is something elitist behind this. All these ordinary, run of the mill hackers intruding on the clique. What a horrible horrible blog post
eXpl0it3r 6y ago
Both posts use the same hyperbole of a DDoS on open source projects and it hurts both posts. Dealing with spam is a pain, it's annoying and it being somewhat incentivized doesn't really help. But claiming that it's a huge load of work and pretending that maintainers are drowning in spam pull requests is also very ridiculous. If you don't have the time to close a bunch of pull requests, then maybe it's time you get someone additional onto the project that can help you out. Ask the last few people that have made high quality PRs or maybe just helped with something small, whether they're interested in helping out more. Stop whining of how hard the life of an OSS maintainer is and invite others to help you out.
- julianmarq 6y ago
  I'm confused, your argument for saying this isn't a bad thing is and that developers are not drowning in spam is telling them to... Get more people involved, so that they can take some of the load off of the maintainer. You suggest that they aren't capable of running the projects they created entirely out of love for the craft, and were handling well enough, without help only because DO's marketing stunt might probably cause burnout. Did I get it right or did I misintepret something? > Stop whining of how hard the life of an OSS maintainer is and invite others to help you out. Are you a maintainer? How many of them have you offered to help with the spam? And don't you think there are better contributions you could make if it weren't for the deluge?
f69281c 6y ago
- Create new github account - Make PR via automation - Earn prestigious t-shirt - Sell prestigious t-shirt - Repeat as many times as possible Is this what's going on? With the right tooling you could net a profit. I mean you're crashing the reputation of the project and the value of the shirt, but from a ruthlessly objective perspective (Not that that's my perspective), who cares if you wreck those things?

Spamtoberfest

144 points by als0 6y ago

pvg 6y ago

Story dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894

sixhobbits 6y ago
It's similar but not a dupe
- pvg 6y ago
  It's a dupe because that's how HN dupes work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24372326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24372326 The many hadith of dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20dupe&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - sixhobbits 6y ago
    interesting - still seems different to me. Those are about different news articles reporting on the same "event". These are two different (though similar) individual's experiences of Hacktoberfest.
    - pvg 6y ago
      I mean, you can finesse it a zillion different ways but it's the same story. You can tell it's the same story because you get the same kinds of comments. There's always someone who hasn't seen the story. There's always some slightly different take someone could write about the story. But if these aren't duped out, the front page would be the same five stories every day and complaints about how it's the same five stories. Just flag dupes and carry on!

zabardasth 6y ago

My manager mentioned Hacktoberfest a while back. Honestly I’d never heard of it. When I went to check it out, I was greeted with millions of commits of whitespace. Now I dream of the whitespace. I’ve learned to embrace the whitespace. And it’s fellow companions, the humble carriage return and line feed.

akerro 6y ago
i prefer 3 spaces intentation or tabs, please accept my RP
onion2k 6y ago
I didn't know whitespace[1] was popular on Github... ;) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...

avolcano 6y ago

I suppose, as a DigitalOcean subscriber for the past five or so years, I should probably send them an angry email about this. I don't know if they'll be particularly threatened by me pulling my $12 a month, but maybe it'd at least get this noticed by some part of the org that isn't keeping up with engineering news...

dkersten 6y ago
I already contacted support and they sent me a “we’re working on it, here’s our response[1]” response, which I didn’t feel was good enough. I’d send them a support message to make it known that their customers are displeased about their actions. [1] https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update
- dorian-graph 6y ago
  I've contacted support as well to express my disappointment.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Unless you make billing department notice, they aren't going to care.
vsareto 6y ago
I want to say just go spam PRs on the DO repos and maybe they'll do something about it. But totally don't do that because you read it here.

villgax 6y ago

Sadly the bulk of it all is Indians with spam. All for a T-shirt & some stickers for laptops. DigitalOcean better stop this ritual.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I think we can be annoyed with low quality spam without dragging whole nationalities under the bus.
- villgax 6y ago
  Yeah true, but just look at the bulk https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama

minxomat 6y ago

Youtube vids are telling people to spam to get free merch: https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944 https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944 DO is aware.

bronson 6y ago
> DO is aware and saying that they can’t do anything, that the project maintainers need to wade through the garbage and mark it spam. The maintainers don’t get anything for their additional work. Way to go DO.

edw 6y ago

Coming soon, if it's not already here in Preview Edition: Eternal Hacktober. Every day GitHub more resembles a gamified social media platform.

akerro 6y ago
Xorg foundation had something like that, I think they also paid for important works before GSoC - both of which have much higher entry level: X.Org Endless Vacation of Code https://www.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas/ https://www.x.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas/

jrockway 6y ago

People really seem to be looking for someone to blame here, but Github was always public and there was always the ability for any random person to inundate you with garbage pull requests. My experience maintaining open source projects is that most pull requests are more work to review (and coach) then they would be to just do from scratch yourself. But you're letting people contribute to something bigger than themselves, being a part of something. And, the first small request may lead to big improvements in the future. So maybe it's not all bad. It doesn't bother me that DigitalOcean is incentivizing people to contribute to open source. Yeah, they were pretty bad at it, but we were all bad at it at some point. Encouraging people to take that chance is valuable to me. (Some other comments mention sending DigitalOcean an angry email because they are customers. I'm a customer too! Maybe I'll send them a nice email.) Github could do some work to improve this. For example, they could add a feature that requires lint/tests to pass before the PR is even brought to the attention of a maintainer. That would be good even outside of Hacktoberfest; I have no doubt wasted a colleague's time pointing out a lint error that the linter would have pointed out a few minutes later (if I had not forgotten to run it). People get a chance to try out open source contribution. Github gets some ideas on how to improve their product. I'm just not all that angry.

mathnmusic 6y ago
Why would lint/tests fail when docs or README are sabotaged?
- groundCode 6y ago
  Maybe people lint their docs or README with something like vale.
acrispino 6y ago
DO isn't some charity, and it's not their first go around. Dangling free stuff in front of people and then offloading the burden of spam mitigation on people who didn't ask for it is careless at best and arrogant at worst edit: I should also mention, I feel bad for the Community Platform Manager on twitter who can't really fix anything on his own but is still pained that people are unhappy. DO has dumped a bunch of crap on him too.

akerro 6y ago

Wow I saw this was bad last year, but this is terrorism https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311714154701443072/photo/1 https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311714154701443072/...

LandR 6y ago
OK, that's funny!

quadrifoliate 6y ago

> This is what we get with corporate-sponsored “social coding”, brought to you by Digital Ocean and GitHub and McDonalds, home of the Big Mac™. When you build the Facebook of coding, you get the Facebook of coding. The author has this spot on. Everyone who has ever emphasized things like "your commit graph" and metrics like "number of PRs opened", or who uses GitHub star count to judge a project's popularity is collectively responsible for this kind of problem. GitHub is a good tool, but its social aspect does not optimize for meaningful coding contributions, it optimizes for visibility. I agree with the author that sr.ht would likely avoid this problem since it's optimized for actual problems that programmers need to solve. That being said, I think there are two other factors at play here: 1. I had a lot of internal debate about whether or not to say this, but calling it out for what it is – there is a bit of latent racism inherent in this outcry. A lot of the people making the requests seem to be male and South Asian, and I think this triggers people's inbuilt resistance to South Asian names. They will fall over themselves to advise `alina_stravinsky599` on the best way to make a typofix, but will yell "shitoberfest!" when `navinshah53` makes the same PR. [1] 2. Digital Ocean seems to want to juice metrics and use Hacktoberfest as a PR marketing move, so they have no incentive to actually offer personal mentorship that can enable anyone to make meaningful contributions to Open Source. Their "Beginners" page (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#beginners https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#beginners) recycles generic information about making PRs. --------------------- [1] A personal, optional perspective regarding this: If you are a fellow South Asian man like me who actually wants to contribute to Open Source, remember that OSS maintainers will consider your PR as guilty until proven innocent. This is not fair, just like life. Your PRs need to be non-trivial, typo-free, and have perfectly passing tests. If you feel like submitting a simple PR to fix a typo or something, avoid the temptation and just leave it for others to participate in this feel-good fest. Consider spending that time writing closed-source code for money instead.

Thorentis 6y ago
> They will fall over themselves to advise `alina_stravinsky599` on the best way to make a typofix, but will yell "shitoberfest!" when `navinshah53` makes the same PR. Sorry, but stereotypes exist for a reason. South Asians (Indians) are very much over-represented in the "spam commit" category. And so, if people see this enough, they will build up a natural and understandable annoyance and resistance to future commits from such people.

j1elo 6y ago

What I'm surprised is that Hacktoberfest is opt-out, not opt-in, and it's enough to file a Pull Request, not needing for it to be accepted. There, two things that D.O. could change right now to limit the spam, instead of lying about having their hands tied.

jakejarvis 6y ago
> it's enough to file a Pull Request, not needing for it to be accepted This part never made any sense to me. Such an easy fix to make.
- eXpl0it3r 6y ago
  There are a lot of projects that might not merge a PR within a month and the further you are into October the more unlikely it gets that the PR is merged in time. As such I do like it that my contributions to a project do count, even if the maintainer isn't around right now...
  - j1elo 6y ago
    I did think about it when writing the idea, and in the end it still looks to me that it would be worth it. This rule would mean contributors would actually care to initiate a conversation about their intented work, and would probably drive them towards projects where there is some activity and positive feedback from the maintainer, instead of projects which didn't want or ask for any contribution, like it happens now. Also, I think such constructive environment could drive a reasonable maintainer to help the contributors by fast-tracking the PR in case the end of October was approaching. And by taking into account the PR merge date, not the PR creation date, it would mean you as participant could start working on some PR even before October.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    DO could just check again for merged PRs whenever they want.
- benibela 6y ago

systemvoltage 6y ago

Can someone explain how these spams are created? Who creates these (I know DO, but why do they create a bot to spam repos)? What is the alleged motivation behind these PRs? I am out of loop with this one.

jayflux 6y ago
It’s not bots, it’s hundreds or thousands of people doing the bare minimum to submit a pull request and get the t shirt
tazjin 6y ago
It's not DO who are creating the bots. People are doing this to get free t-shirts from DO, without having to actually make meaningful contributions.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I was missing this piece of puzzle. It all makes sense now. Thank you. Wait... why the hell is DO giving out free t-shirts in automated fashion without checking individual contributions! What could go wrong!!!
mathnmusic 6y ago
Yesterday, this youtuber exhorted its viewers to submit at least 20 PRs in not-so-popular repos so that at least 4 remain unmarked as "invalid" to qualify for free t-shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas He has 670K subscribers on Youtube, and he insisted that not a single t-shirt should remain unclaimed after 1st October. Anger aside, it was DO's job to think of poor incentive alignments and loopholes, because at the Internet scale, every loophole gets exploited sooner or later. Maintainers have been telling them of the spam issue for years. For urgent action, DO should try to get that YouTuber to create a follow-up video to ask people to stop spamming Github. Even canceling the HacktoberFest and restarting it with new rules would be better than just giving up (as Matt Cowley seems to be indicating here: https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311594424049307649 https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311594424049307649 ) And eventually, invest in educating these new developers about a responsible way of participating in open-source.

triceratops 6y ago

Can we stop spamming HN with stories about Spamtoberfest? We get it, DO did a bad thing solely for their benefit. While we're on the topic, let's talk of ways Github can ease the load on OSS maintainers for the rest of the year too. Examples: 1. (someone else suggested) Mandatory to run linters or pass tests before sending a PR. 2. Vacation mode for repos, where all PRs are auto-declined, with a vacation auto-responder message. This is also good for maintainers' mental health. 3. Ability to whitelist contributors who are allowed to send PRs (this might be controversial and against the spirit of Open Source) 4. Ability to set a TTL on PRs per-repo. If an owner doesn't respond within the TTL, it's auto-closed. 5. Stop showing commit graphs and the other nonsense that turns committing code into a public performance. I'm sure there are other suggestions.

balloob 6y ago

> Let’s be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source. This statement by the author is not true. I lead Home Assistant[1], last year the 10th most active project on GitHub[2]. We love Hacktoberfest at Home Assistant and gladly participate. We have gotten a lot of high quality contributions and some of these contributors also stayed and joined our core team. We've been many years in the top contributed projects during Hacktoberfest. In earlier years spam was higher but now it's not too bad. The biggest thing that they did to reduce the spam to us was making sure our repository didn't get linked on their website. I see a bunch of calls of people are trying to stop Hacktoberfest because it attracts people to open source and we're all so busy. But… if we get more people and we get them along as a maintainer, the long term work load can be reduced because more people are working on open source. So instead of calls for trying to stop Hacktoberfest, let's ask for a better way to control spam. I think that the announced guide by DO to tell people to open a PR on their own repo is a good start. And if anyone reading this is interested in participating in Hacktoberfest by improving their smart home, check out the Home Assistant Hacktoberfest blogpost[3]! [1]: https://www.home-assistant.io https://www.home-assistant.io [2]: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects [3]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-2020/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-...

pseudalopex 6y ago
I see calls to make it opt in mainly. Including from the person who runs it for DO.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311391325443555328 https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311391325443555328
corobo 6y ago
> if we get more people and we get them along as a maintainer Big 'if' considering a majority of the spammy PRs I've seen today are editing the project's title to add "- An awesome project". It all feels very automated.
petecoop 6y ago
Thanks for commenting here, I use HA and I will contribute :)

j1elo 6y ago

So here is an community-wide project idea I just had: gather as many spam reports as possible, and build a training set that can be used next year to implent a Github Actions workflow to automatically reject Pull Requests based on a confidence threshold. Like a spam filter for PRs. Something like this: https://github.com/marketplace/issue-label-bot https://github.com/marketplace/issue-label-bot but assigning an "invalid" label and closing the PR. Maintainers might want to enable this only during October. It would be a cool reaction from the community, given that there is not much else we can do. The best place where to find training examples that I can think of is @shitoberfest on Twitter (https://twitter.com/shitoberfest https://twitter.com/shitoberfest), but most of them are just screenshots, not actual links :(

avery42 6y ago
Sounds like a lot of work to fix a company's marketing stunt.
- j1elo 6y ago
  Turns out someone had a similar idea, simpler, but helpful and effective! https://github.com/marketplace/actions/check-and-reject-spam-prs https://github.com/marketplace/actions/check-and-reject-spam...

jimnotgym 6y ago

> Let’s be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source. That is a bold claim. Hacktoberfest being in the press reminded me how little I have been able to code in the last two years, and made me consider joining in FOSS again. There is a part of me that there is something elitist behind this. All these ordinary, run of the mill hackers intruding on the clique. What a horrible horrible blog post

eXpl0it3r 6y ago

Both posts use the same hyperbole of a DDoS on open source projects and it hurts both posts. Dealing with spam is a pain, it's annoying and it being somewhat incentivized doesn't really help. But claiming that it's a huge load of work and pretending that maintainers are drowning in spam pull requests is also very ridiculous. If you don't have the time to close a bunch of pull requests, then maybe it's time you get someone additional onto the project that can help you out. Ask the last few people that have made high quality PRs or maybe just helped with something small, whether they're interested in helping out more. Stop whining of how hard the life of an OSS maintainer is and invite others to help you out.

julianmarq 6y ago
I'm confused, your argument for saying this isn't a bad thing is and that developers are not drowning in spam is telling them to... Get more people involved, so that they can take some of the load off of the maintainer. You suggest that they aren't capable of running the projects they created entirely out of love for the craft, and were handling well enough, without help only because DO's marketing stunt might probably cause burnout. Did I get it right or did I misintepret something? > Stop whining of how hard the life of an OSS maintainer is and invite others to help you out. Are you a maintainer? How many of them have you offered to help with the spam? And don't you think there are better contributions you could make if it weren't for the deluge?

f69281c 6y ago

- Create new github account - Make PR via automation - Earn prestigious t-shirt - Sell prestigious t-shirt - Repeat as many times as possible Is this what's going on? With the right tooling you could net a profit. I mean you're crashing the reputation of the project and the value of the shirt, but from a ruthlessly objective perspective (Not that that's my perspective), who cares if you wreck those things?