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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

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.
johannes1234321 6y ago
The point is that DO incentivizes "do something which takes time from maintainers, without bringing them value" GitHub fundamentally has some mechanisms which incentivizes some "useless" PRs especially to popular projects ("see, I contributed to $popular_project") while it directly adds the metrics ("oh, just one line changed") where most people quickly learn that there is no point in those. Mind that looking at PRs is not a short thing. Usually I try to follow up with folks who send partially useful things to learn about users and maybe get them to contribute repeatedly. I won't expect anything from Hacktoberfest spamers.
hnaccy 6y ago
>People really seem to be looking for someone to blame here Well... DO created a contest that rewarded low effort PRs and an Indian youtuber made a video telling his viewers to make spam PRs to claim shirts from DO. With some searches you could find 10ks of garbage PRs on github almost all from Indian accounts and in similar format to one shown in youtube video. This isn't beginner programmers making mistakes it's just garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas

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.

johannes1234321 6y ago

The point is that DO incentivizes "do something which takes time from maintainers, without bringing them value" GitHub fundamentally has some mechanisms which incentivizes some "useless" PRs especially to popular projects ("see, I contributed to $popular_project") while it directly adds the metrics ("oh, just one line changed") where most people quickly learn that there is no point in those. Mind that looking at PRs is not a short thing. Usually I try to follow up with folks who send partially useful things to learn about users and maybe get them to contribute repeatedly. I won't expect anything from Hacktoberfest spamers.

hnaccy 6y ago

>People really seem to be looking for someone to blame here Well... DO created a contest that rewarded low effort PRs and an Indian youtuber made a video telling his viewers to make spam PRs to claim shirts from DO. With some searches you could find 10ks of garbage PRs on github almost all from Indian accounts and in similar format to one shown in youtube video. This isn't beginner programmers making mistakes it's just garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas