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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

787 points by Sandeepg33k 6y ago

cheschire 6y ago
I blame git providers for not giving very fine grained controls to repo owners to limit PRs.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  The fact that GitHub doesn’t allow you to close pull requests for your project is a very strange choice. There are so many open source mirrors that literally write bots to close pull requests because they don’t accept patches through GitHub…
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smashah 6y ago
I don't ever merge low effort or self aggrandizing PRs. I just implement the change myself then add the PR person as a contributor on the commit via GitHub desktop.
SirSavary 6y ago
It's convenient that Digital Ocean has a scapegoat for 2020 but his video doesn't explain the previous years of spammy pull requests.
- sjrd 6y ago
  Absolutely. That guy's video may have caused a lot of spammy PRs, but I'm pretty sure they're far from the majority.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  As a mailserver owner, spam is the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says digitalocean. Malicious bots would be 2nd. I've never learned why DO is a malicious traffic leader. Maybe they're competing with OVH to be the next MCColo.
  - Craighead 6y ago
    Or the next bulletproof hosting
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    > Maybe they're competing with OVH to be the next MCColo. That's my guess. That was the original value prop, right? MCColo with SSDs on every instance.
  - easton 6y ago
    It’s because they made a rather cheap Linux VPS that is extremely easy to get up. It’s 4 clicks on DO (login with GitHub, click new droplet, click $5, click create), vs 15 clicks on Azure or AWS (where you have to create a bespoke account, go through the silly billing configuration, etc) where they expect you're running all of this past your procurement people and that they’ll want to configure stuff too.
- tzs 6y ago
  Was it much of a problem before this year? Looking back at all prior HN stories with "hacktoberfest" in the title or with "hacktoberfest" and "spam" in the comments, I can't find any that talk about it being a big problem before this year. I found one maintainer who said they got a non-negligible number of garbage pull requests for it, but they still said Hacktoberfest was cool. There was also one post about a filter one project adopted a year ago that used heuristics to identify and automatically reject Hacktoberfest pull requests from new submitters that were too trivial. I'd have expected more if it was a problem to the extent that it seems to be this year.
  - asicsp 6y ago
    One of my repos got spam PRs for last two years. So I archived the repo this time before October as a proactive measure. I got spam PRs in other months too, but October was the worst.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Same. I don’t think I got a single spammy PR I could attribute to Hacktoberfest before this year, I had thought it must be people staying inside for COVID or something. But I guess I know the actual cause now.
    - qaisjp 6y ago
      Agreed. We got two this year. Never received a spam PR before.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hobofan 6y ago
  If a single person can cause that much harm, it's not their fault, it's the fault of the process/system.
jdminhbg 6y ago
What I don’t get is... why do this for a t-shirt? Am I missing something?
- gruez 6y ago
  T-shirts are worth significantly more (relatively) in poorer parts of the world. It might be worth 0.5hr of average wage in the us but be worth 5hr of average wage in India.
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    I thought of that, but if you’re wealthy enough to watch YouTube and submit PRs on GitHub, is that really that much of a reward?
    - samatman 6y ago
      I think you have this backward. If you had to work for three months to afford your phone, would you be more likely to spend fifteen minutes to get a free shirt, or less?
    - austhrow743 6y ago
      You can be pretty damn poor and do both of those things.
      - hombre_fatal 6y ago
        My entire youth could be described as having all the time in the world but not a dime to my name.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        This was much of my youth too and I grew up in an upper-middle class family in the Bay Area :/ I think this would apply to most children.
    - higerordermap 6y ago
satya71 6y ago
Misaligned incentives always cause trouble, scapegoats not withstanding.
- msla 6y ago
  > Misaligned incentives always cause trouble, scapegoats not withstanding. Yes. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. Stepping on a soapbox, I think a certain kind of economics thinking should be introduced to students at a reasonably young age, no later than secondary education, that thinking being "Incentive Analysis" where students are taught to think through where various people's and groups' incentives are, and why it matters. If nothing else, it should clear up fuzzy cliche-based thinking which can be misleading even though it has a kernel of truth: "If you aren't paying, you're the product" is wrong in some very important ways, starting with the fact that if you are paying, you might still be the product. For example: You pay for a service, in effect giving the company money for selling your information to other companies eager to have a line on a high-value paying customer.
  - pferde 6y ago
    Check your faulty logic there. The statement "if A, then B", does not imply "if not A, then not B". There's nothing wrong with accuracy of "If you aren't paying, you're the product".
    - msla 6y ago
      It isn't my faulty logic.
thrawa567 6y ago
Any sufficient large number of people will behave idiotically (from lat. idiota, ignorant)
- triangleman 6y ago
  The Latin idiota is borrowed from Greek ἰδιώτης idiōtēs which is from ἴδιος idios meaning "private" or "peculiar". Idiot has historically meant "retarded" so if you wanted to say "ignorantly" you could have just said that, or "idiotically" is fine but don't pretend it has such wholesome roots.
samatman 6y ago
Subtitle: bad idea has predictable consequence.
Google234 6y ago
The shitoberfest Twitter account is hilarious. https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest
- neom 6y ago
  You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did at DigitalOcean was "just for marketing" - everything we did was because we genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all the vitriol. Maybe it's gone off the rails and needs to be revised or reconsidered, but creating "shitoberfest" twitter and putting things in blog posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive. (I haven't worked at DigitalOcean for 5+ years)
  - js2 6y ago
    I think this may be a small example of the path to hell being paved with good intentions, or of unintended consequences.
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    > You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it odd that people who had contributed meaningfully to OSS would suggest a numerical bound on PRs as a measure of meaningful contributions. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with. The "bad actors" are assholes, sure, but I think you also need to revise your concepts about meaningful OSS contributions.
robmsmt 6y ago
I don't understand why a person or persons create new repos and merge PRs into each others hello world empty repos. This would be be the optimal solution no?
- Google234 6y ago
  This is still not fair to real participants. People that cheat the system like that should not get rewarded
rococode 6y ago
GitHub actually released a full feature specifically in response to this spam? That's pretty impressive given that we're still in the first day of this (or maybe great timing if it had already been in development).
- Ndymium 6y ago
  It already existed but now it allows a full month instead of shorter timespans.
- captn3m0 6y ago
  It has been asked for many times (extended duration) and was likely in development.
cbanek 6y ago
I feel like this is the ultimate tutorial syndrome. People doing exactly what the video said!
- sreevisakh 6y ago
  Fact is, we would have done the same after watching his video if we didn't know what PRs and FOSS contributions are. He doesn't explain what PRs are for, or what good PRs look like. He doesn't even teach how to use git for PR - all those spam are using Github's web editor. There is absolutely no clue given about the harm it would cause. For comparison, imagine a hardware DIY tutorial that never mentions any safety concerns.
robmsmt 6y ago
A better idea would be for hacktoberfest to send everyone who has made a 1-line change to a README.md as their PRs to be given a dunces hat instead.
- rriepe 6y ago
  An entire honeypot conference would be fun.
- ackbar03 6y ago
  Somehow I think that'd just add oil to the fire. I wouldn't mind a dunce hat from digital Ocean
- cvrjk 6y ago
  Or maybe they should secretly ship the shirts with a large "spam PR" written on it for those who raised spammy PRs.
teknas 6y ago
Shameless plug: I created a detection script to find and close such spammy PR's. https://github.com/TechieBoy/spamtoberfest https://github.com/TechieBoy/spamtoberfest
- midasz 6y ago
  Hacktoberfest spam killer - An Amazing Project
lipstone 6y ago
If everything that CodeWithHarry says is true, then I don't see how it's his fault. Also, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Just ignore the spammy emails for a while and close the pull requests.
- kgurnani 6y ago
  I speak hindi, and in fact he is actually encouraging spam and is BSing in the response. He has said to look for repos with low traffic and do a pull request changing the readme and to do it 20 times, so if most will be marked as invalid, at least 4 wont.
  - sbmthakur 6y ago
    One preview image of his video literally said they are distributing free t-shirts, still them. https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311843369077764097?s=19 https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311843369077764097?...
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      This is literally how DigitalOcean is advertising their program, too. It’s just that they intended their audience to be people who fully understood the goal of what this was supposed to be, and the YouTube video was watched by many who didn’t.
- faithfulcat 6y ago
  Hindi is my native language. CodeWithHarry, in fact, is actually subliminally asking the users to create very low quality PRs. Or at least very heavily implying it. In one part of the video he mentions that last year DO was not able to distribute all the t-shirts as they didn't have enough PRs. He goes on to mention that "this year, we don't want any T-shirts to remain". If I get time, I'll point out more lines from the video where he is promoting PR for the sake of PR. I do agree that it may not be totally his fault in the whole larger context of things.
- jabroni_salad 6y ago
higerordermap 6y ago
This is not only kind of spam going on here. A twitter user mentioned that some youtubers are themselves creating assignment aggregation type repos, and encouraging their viewers to contribute some copy paste code to those repos and they approve the pull request. That's insane. I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian.
- aexl 6y ago
  These type of repositories have existed since the first Hacktoberfest. They might even be useful for beginners to learn how to prepare their first pull request. But the idea of Hacktoberfest is clearly not to submit all your pull requests to such a repository. It even seems as though DigitalOcean is blocking these type of repositories. From the FAQ: My pull request is marked as being on an excluded repository. What does this mean? Unfortunately, your pull request was made on a repository that doesn’t align with the core values of Hacktoberfest. We’ve decided that pull requests made to this repository will not count toward completing the challenge.
- obviyus 6y ago
  Right there with you. It’s a little disheartening that I hesitate to tell people where I’m based because of the precedent these people have set.
- jankotek 6y ago
  I would not be too harsh. This way it does not spam normal repos.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- blueblisters 6y ago
  > I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian. I don't understand this. You don't have to defend the actions of individual(s) even if they share their nationality with you. It's sufficient to call them out for unacceptable behavior. For people who ascribe this to all Indians, it's on them not on you.
fergie 6y ago
I have a couple of vaguely popular repos on github (~100,000 downloads a month) Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook. If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold. (In the large scheme of things, its really positive that so many people worked out how to make a PR, and were then motivated to do so- lets not shame them too hard. Although occasionally neccessary, we must be mindful about gatekeeping, especially with the young and inexperienced)
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  Sure, but those types of PRs aren't what's happening here. Check out this PR: https://github.com/OscarZhou/CSharpTraining/pull/1/commits/8e3600fcd5dca8f9f0d16d56237299d893f1aaf6 https://github.com/OscarZhou/CSharpTraining/pull/1/commits/8... How would you like to receive dozens of PRs like that? You would absolutely consider that blatant spam.
  - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    I think they're referring to one example on Twitter (unfortunately, I can't find it again now) which was calling out a legitimate single-character typo fix. As someone who occasionally likes to report typos, I appreciate someone telling us they're appreciated :)
- cbanek 6y ago
  I have done one letter typo fixes to doc repos as a 3rd party and felt great about them. One of them was actually a typo in a command line that I found by going through their instructions step by step copying and pasting each line. I was seriously confused when it didn't work!
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Yes. Fixing up documentation is always helpful, even if it’s a one letter change! Now, updating “copyright 2018-2019” to “2020” isn’t.
Nezteb 6y ago
I'd much rather spend a minimum of $20 for the t-shirt and have the proceeds go to an open-source project of my choosing (or a pre-selected list of projects).
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yeah instead of a t-shirt they should give you github sponsor "credits".
Google234 6y ago
Irony: https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/582 https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/582
fpgaminer 6y ago
Glad I saw this article! I got two pull requests on one of my otherwise inactive repos last night. The first one just tweaked one thing in the README pointlessly. Seemed odd, but benign. Then a second one came later; another small silly tweak. Good to know the reason now. Luckily that repo isn't terribly important and was only two pieces of "spam". But I can't imagine the shitstorm real open source projects are going to experience. Either they have to weather the storm or, what, disable PRs for a month? Yikes.
superasn 6y ago
I think this should definitely be opt-in. DO should make a list of participating repos and only PRs to those make you eligible.
- trinix912 6y ago
  Wouldn't that put too much burden on those repos as all participants would race to submit a PR there?
gjvc 6y ago
This shows the utility of being able to throttle buggy clients.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  But also the difficulty of dealing with distributed buggy/problematic clients. Same reason that fail2ban is less effective against large botnets, password spraying defeats many rate-limits, and abusive NTP use by routers (https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/130209/d-link-firmware-abuses-open-ntp-servers https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/130209/d-link-firmware-a...) is so hard to deal with.
henricao 6y ago
Not fair to say he ruined it. Even if he promoted people creating spam PRs. He exposed the weak foundations for this campaign and hopefully now they will fix it. DO said, it has been 7 years handling spams and they haven't fix the issue. Now it is so visible, that they can't ignore it anymore.
chillee 6y ago
I agree that the spam is problematic, but I feel the need to call out his "data collection". As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says > A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues. and > A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues. ??? Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day? Amazing Project is more relevant, but if you take a look at those issues (sorted by newest), you see that most of the PRs that show aren't spam at all: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project&s=created&type=Issues https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project&s=created... If you want to count how many spam PRs were directly inspired by the video, you can try searching "an amazing project" (with quotes), and filtering by newest. It looks like there have only been about 50 PRs directly inspired by it. https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%22an+amazing+project%22&s=created&type=Issues https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%22an+amazing+project%22&...
- TheDong 6y ago
  Github allows you to search by dates (newer than, date ranges, etc), so for example, you can add the query "created:>=2020-09-30" (the date the youtube video was uploaded) to get a more accurate list. From this search, it looks like it's definitely on the order of hundreds: https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3E%3D2020-09-30&type=Issues https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3... I opened a few at random to spot-check, and they all seemed like garbage to me. Like this one, ugh https://github.com/mongodb/docs/pull/4402/files https://github.com/mongodb/docs/pull/4402/files
  - chillee 6y ago
    Sorting by relevance doesn't get you a representative sample - that bubbles PRs who say "amazing project" in the title to the top(which are indeed mostly spam). If you restrict it to "in:title", you see that there's only 44: https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+amazing+project+created%3A%3E%3D2020-09-30&type=Issues https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+amazing+project+creat... And if you sort by "newest" or "oldest", which provide a more representative sample, you can see that most of them are not spam: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3E%3D2020-09-30&s=created&type=Issues https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project+created%3...
quadrifoliate 6y ago
[edit: Possibly I'm being too hasty in recommending swearing off Open Source contributions. Go forth and contribute, I suppose :) Leaving my original comment below for completeness.] For other South Asian/Indian people like me, a pessimistic but practical counterpoint to this -- if you happen to be Indian and have a username that marks you as such, just lie low for a bit and don't contribute anything; especially during Hacktoberfest. I promise you that this will actually be a net positive for your career. Work on proprietary (aka closed source software) and earn money. Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us in the first place, and the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- higerordermap 6y ago
  > the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it. The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this. I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    > I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation. I think that we are in agreement regarding that? I have no right to complain about it either. I can offer advice to bypass Open Source contributions altogether, which would have the side effect of stopping incidents like this. And it's not like projects are starved for README contributions either, coding bootcamps or someone else will pick up the slack.
    - higerordermap 6y ago
      Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example? Let me be clear, when you write open source code there are incentives like creating / improving tool for our own use, experimenting, or having a legitimate contribution, even if it is for sake of resume. The software we want to write as OSS is often not the software we can write as proprietary, sell and make money. Should we give up all the advantages of open source for our side projects? Aren't other people contributing to open source and that's making world better? Should we do a disservice to ourselves and open source community because some people among us have created a bad reputation? It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
sam1r 6y ago
I don’t get what the big deal of this is. 1-50 PRs with insignificant changes. Simple fix, simple scripting of prs.all().forEach( if pr.MinorChanges, then close w/ comment). Minor changes are just taking the number of diff files, and checking if it’s less than > 1. That’s just one way to do it. Feels like enough venting has been done, but why bring up the problem when you can come forth with a solution. Or at least propose one? Furthermore, does this deserve Twitter attention? How about ours? [hn commubity]
- xmprt 6y ago
  A lot of minor changes are important though and blanket closing all diffs with minor changes will take out legitimate changes with it. Also, it's so easy to get around this by just making diffs with two files changed. Or making a diff that copy pastes the same line 100 times.
random_visitor 6y ago
Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't. This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week". I guess this was bound to happen since hacktoberfest and similar programs have become so popular. Part of me is sad that some influencer is so careless and rallied 20 something enthusiastic kids to do this and adding another bad incident Indians will be remembered for. Edit: I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile. When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. It's just so much of a convoluted mess, that even the capable students distance themselves from it (convoluted, as in these capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now. And the one club head is a former part of these guys who really hasn't improved in the 2 years after that). Much of this bad guidance contributes to that statistics you see on how "90% of Indian coders are unqualified" Edit 2: (just dropping my reply down the thread from) Someone mentioned that I shouldn't drag other Indians into this. I guess that was bad judgement on my part as it doesn't really matter here, I apologise it I came off as disrespectful to fellow South Asian demographic, that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to bring attention to an underlying issue. We have a lot of bad rep for filling sites like Quora and Medium with loads of low effort content, sending unsolicited messages on LinkedIn and AngelList, and in general bad etiquette in messaging others over the internet. Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populace), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people on how to conduct written communication and how to behave in casual to semi-formal settings in the internet.
- 6y ago
susam 6y ago
I received two pull requests for two projects on GitHub last night. I am the author of one and the maintainer of the other. At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the pull request (PR) was inconsistent with my preference. There was no explanation whatsoever regarding why this change was warranted. Then I looked at the PR author's profile and found that the same person had submitted several such trivial PRs to other projects too, all of them changing "this" to "the" at some places in README files. It all began to make sense when I looked at the calendar. It was Oct 01. This looked like PR spam due to Hacktoberfest. For now, I just labelled the PRs as "invalid" (as suggested by https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/ https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/), closed the PRs, and moved on. Like all good things created with good intentions on the Internet, spam is hurting this event and bringing bad reputation to it. The possibility of large scale, endless spam should be worked into the design of any new Internet-based event or solution.
- ThePhysicist 6y ago
  I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the README. Now it makes sense. I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    Yeah. Best approach I can think of would be something like: Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull Requests on GitHub. :) The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :( Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :) eg combine encouragement for the bit they got right + info on what needs work, and point them in the right direction for fixing it Some people will probably just not be bothered, but others might get involved in the suggested way. Hopefully. :)
SPBS 6y ago
https://mobile.twitter.com/avestura/status/1311753994071666692 https://mobile.twitter.com/avestura/status/13117539940716666... This guy is just straight up begging for a PR merge so that he can get his free T shirt -- I'd wager a good portion of these PR submitters have no idea what they're getting into, they just think they can get a free shirt if they do this according to what the youtube video said.
- slimsag 6y ago
  Most of them will because Hacktoberfest relies on project maintainers to flag the PR as `invalid` within a certain window and close it, AFAIK. Though I imagine with all the outrage over this that will definitely be changing.
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    Wow, that's weird. IIRC the first year the PRs had to be merged for them to count.
    - easton 6y ago
      They said that they didn’t want you to not get credit because you worked for hours on a PR only for it to be not accepted because the maintainers didn’t like it for some reason. Even if that reason was that it wasn’t any work at all. But I think they want people to mark real-bad PRs as spam so they can not count them.
maple3142 6y ago
Is there a reason why some repo get a lot of spam, but some don't? Is there a similarity between repos getting a lot of spam?
tom-_- 6y ago
Spam PRs are frustrating but this rant just reads as petty and vindictive. The author claims that he doesn't "want to cancel or shame him personally", which just rings of false humility considering he named the article "How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020" and then chose to expose his Youtube name repeatedly, something even other frustrated tweeters chose NOT to do. Here's what CodeWithHarry did: He created an example video of submitting a PR to an open source project that repeatedly reminded its viewers to make worthwhile contributions. He then posted a lengthy response to again inform his viewers to NOT submit spammy PRs. He's acting responsibly and in good faith. Does this deserve lynching by the twitter mob? Edit: Yes, the video appears to be mostly about showing kids how to get free swag with open source contributions without too much concern for whether these PRs are worthwhile. But the author of this post is absolutely trying to shame/cancel him personally.
- throwaway24324 6y ago
  You forget to mention the part where he says "not to spend too much time" on the pull requests.
- occamschainsaw 6y ago
  I am not sure if it was entirely good faith. In the video he explicitly states (in Hindi) that this is an easy way to get a free t-shirt in few clicks, you don't even need to know anything about GitHub.
- _RPL5_ 6y ago
  The top comment in this thread (from someone who speaks the language) says that he openly encouraged people to spam meaningless PRs in order to get "free swag." I think the rebuke he is getting is deserved.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    Even the title of the video is "How to Earn Free T-Shirt, Swag & Goodies Online!", and the description is in the same vein mostly focusing on getting swag, while seeing (meaningful) PRs as secondary.
gkoberger 6y ago
What a crappy framing. No, one guy didn't ruin it! He was just showing people how to do a PR, and since it was a video, he made a small change. He didn't frame it as cheating; he was just trying to get people into Open Source. Sure, the result is annoying, but it's really unfair to lay this on Harry's feet. This sucks. Everyone involved who was named is just trying to encourage open source.
- the_pwner224 6y ago
  You are incorrect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas "How to Earn Free T-Shirt, Swag & Goodies Online!"
orliesaurus 6y ago
I have 2 OSS projects [1]: Sadly, 0 PRs. But I have tons of open issues with complaints. As usual, 0 help given. I guess I am just another unappreciated OSS maintainer sad_face [1] https://github.com/orliesaurus?tab=repositories&q=&type=source&language= https://github.com/orliesaurus?tab=repositories&q=&type=sour...
- yougaindra 6y ago
  don't be sad I raised PR to resolve first issue on first project I saw on your page. cheers. PS : I really wanted to mark your README.md with "An Amazing Project" but I guess there are enough "Amazing Projects" on github for october :P
  - orliesaurus 6y ago
    thank you!
stingraycharles 6y ago
Isn’t the solution obvious? DO needs to change the rules, so that all this gamification becomes useless. Either projects opt-in, or they add some qualification to what is an acceptable PR. Of course the Youtuber has a role in this, but I feel like they’re just playing the game; the real solution needs to come from the source of the problems, which is DO.
susam 6y ago
On the topic of pull request (PR) spam originating due to Hacktoberfest, here is some useful information from Hacktoberfest FAQ [1]: "As a maintainer, how should I handle spam pull requests? We dislike seeing spam pull requests just as much as you, so please give them an invalid or spam label and close them. Pull requests that contain a label with the word invalid or spam won't be counted toward Hacktoberfest." It is really quite easy to follow. The 'invalid' label is available by default already, so flagging spam is as simple as selecting that label and closing the PR. See also Hacktober's recent update on reducing spam [2]. [1]: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/ https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/ [2]: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It’s still work, though. I assume for most people it’s not a big deal, but I have heard of maintainers of many popular projects being inundated with spam-which they, not DigitalOcean-need to deal with.
_RPL5_ 6y ago
When I first heard about Hacktoberfest a few days ago, I thought it was neat. I am relatively new to programming, and as a newbie I got excited that there was an event like this. It prompted me to read about how pull requests work, and to research several open source projects that I could contribute to. I haven't made any contributions yet, but it's on my to-do list for October. I suppose you can already count me as one of the beneficiaries of this program, simply because it got me to learn new things. I think Hacktoberfest is a good idea, speed bumps like this one notwithstanding.
jp0d 6y ago
I've reported his video as a spam. He is promoting his fraudulent methods to teach people how to get a free t-shirt at the cost of the wonderful open source software community. I wrote the following in the details of the spam report. To be honest, I don't think he is a bad person. He probably didn't think that his video would cause this. But as a decent human being, the least he could do is take down that video. ``` This video is promoting and teaching people how to get a free t-shit by showing them how to do spam pull request. These requests have flooded real world open source projects on Github. This is ruining the community's efforts. ```
deleted 6y ago
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dreamcompiler 6y ago
Human botnet (Humannet?) DDOS attack coordinated via Youtube. That's kind of a new one. Edit: Wait...I can get T-shirts for PR'S? Somehow I missed that memo. Is this retroactive? /s
unlimit 6y ago
Being from India, his videos did show up on my recommendations. And I have opened some of them. The tone of the videos are bit off for me. He has some photo copyed written notes that everyone does in colleges in India. Needless to say I never could go beyond these display of notes. After doing all these programming videos, he then started doing laptop recommendations and what not. But I never expected this. I mean there are lot of simple tech videos coming out of India some good some bad but I never expected to see encouragement of such kind of behaviour. But I have also seen videos by Indian "gurus" who preach how to get free websites on github, without understanding what github really is.
saos 6y ago
> This flood of low quality PR spam appears to come from a YouTuber with an audience of 672K where he demonstrates how easy it is to make a Pull Request to a repo. > Where he went wrong was demonstrating a low quality PR, thus setting the bar low for his viewers who went on to copy exactly what he did. This is the problem on the industry today. All these “how to...” and no depth
dang 6y ago
Is this the same story as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894? what's the difference?
- slimsag 6y ago
  This would be a continuation of that story, where someone did investigation into the cause. The original story you linked did not have a cause mentioned/found at the time it was posted.
  - dang 6y ago
    Ok, we'll leave the current thread up then. Thanks!
LockAndLol 6y ago
Why can't Digital Ocean, this youtuber and Github just work together to make the world a little bit better? It's OK not to be perfect, but they can acknowledge their mistakes and work together to improve them. DigitalOcean could work with maintainers to allow registration and get some kind of participation icon for maintainers to put on their repo. Maintainers, Github and Digital Ocean could work together to define parameters of acceptance for PRs (maybe an integration?). The YouTube could then become the face of the thing for India and show people how to make a meaningful PR on a digital ocean repo. It would also serve as an ad for them. Just be nice to each other...
encom 6y ago
If CloudFlare thinks you're a bot, like me: https://archive.ph/0F5nz https://archive.ph/0F5nz
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
I've made an amazing project for people who need to make amazing pull requests, they can do it here https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject Now I guess I will have to make some sort of solution that autorejects anything that doesn't have the word amazing (or some synonym for amazing, I'm not a tyrant) on edit: hmm, there's a typo in the Readme, a good start.
shanecp 6y ago
Because everything goes through Github, can't they add a simple spam detector? Let's say if the the user doesn't have many PRs in profile, and sending a lot of them within 24 hours. Sounds like it will be a lot easier for github bot to flag these.
dathinab 6y ago
Through given that people where already afraid of it before that video aired I belive it was already a mess and just got worst.
zzo38computer 6y ago
"There's almost no limits, so if your request is merged into any Open Source repository, you qualify. Amazing." Well, not all open source software is using git, and even some that is, doesn't use GitHub. Also, how do they see if you qualify, really? (Do you need a GitHub account? The linked document doesn't seem to say that, or if it does, it isn't very clear.) (Anyways, I wouldn't want to submit a pull request merely for the purpose of the shirt. I would ignore that when making such a thing. If I get a shirt too (and I do not already have enough shirts, although I think I do have enough shirts), then that is a bonus, I suppose.) (I do not use git myself. I think I have never received any patches to my software, except maybe one, but I do not really remember if it is or not. I have, however, merged in other people's changes when I found them, although these aren't requests. Actually, other people have sometimes merged in some of my changes too despite not being a pull request, too. How will that ever count?) Hopefully, it can be explained better.
kstenerud 6y ago
One guy didn't ruin it. This is a classic case of the cobra effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect). DigitalOcean, like the British, had good intentions, but didn't think this through to its logical conclusion.
- masklinn 6y ago
  It has been a recurring issue in previous years. It’s apparently worse this time but they were very much notified, they simply do not care.
moonshinefe 6y ago
I mean, I don't condone what the youtuber did, but I'm not sure who the author is trying to kid here. "I don't think he's a bad person and don't want to shame him. > Literally writes an essay on his very public blog shaming the guy and showing his username/channel repeatedly
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  When we review a serious flaw which caused downtime in production, we aren’t wishy-washy around who and what caused the failure. However, it’s expected that everyone knows it’s a mistake and not deliberate and that there will be an effort to improve and rectify the situation.
grey-area 6y ago
Simple fix for hacktoberfest maintainers - make it opt-in. Only merged PRs with the tag hacktoberfest from maintainers should count. It's absurd that even closed prs count, and absurd they put the burden on maintainers to actively flag spam and auto-include all repos, many repos simply don't want changes of any kind. Yes this means it won't apply to lots of repos and less people will be involved. That's ok.
junon 6y ago
Oh so this is what's happening to my repos. I maintain one that gets ~60 million downloads a week, and is usually the first thing people run to for help when something unrelated goes wrong. This is nothing new, though the volume has increased a bit.
compsciphd 6y ago
If people wanted to farm a t-shirt, just create your own public github repo and make PRs to it. No need to spam real repos.
agustif 6y ago
Couldn't some brighter coder than me make an action/bot for github that automatically closes/dismisses/marks as invalid such trivial and spam PR's?
hacker_ranch 6y ago
I found this project -- https://github.com/DeepfriedDev/hacktober-is https://github.com/DeepfriedDev/hacktober-is -- who is just accepting any pull request as an attempt to somewhat deflect some of the Hacktober spam.
- sreevisakh 6y ago
  That assumes that the spammers know what they are doing. They are just following a video. Many of them probably are clueless about even what Github is for.
piokoch 6y ago
The point is that this is not just a problem of Hacktoberfest - there are some automatic quality assurance tools that check if libraries used in project does not have bugs and they do this also by searching GitHub for reported bugs. If there is a reported and unfixed bug, library is marked as not safe. It happened several times that there was a reported bug, which was totally bogus or added by mistake (added to wrong project for instance), however repo owner hasn't closed it, so the tool gave false positive. Obviously said tool allowed adding exception rules, etc. but I can't imagine how annoying it would be if there were hundreds of such crappy reports and it seems we are going in that direction. This looks like another consequence of globalization and leaving in the "global village", everyone can jump in into someones village and do harm over there and it is hard to get rid or somehow punish such unwanted visitors. People would do a lot to gain 15 minutes of fame, even if this is just wearing some t-shirt. Maybe that is not a big surprise, some people beat their parents or girlfriends or boyfriends and put that on Youtube for fame and money - whole "pato" streamers market is built around this (with said victims participating in the show to earn even more money).
pritambarhate 6y ago
As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India. * "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming". Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how. * Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be. Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway. So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy [2] https://unacademy.com/ https://unacademy.com/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I wouldn't say it's an Indian only phenomenon, plenty of that everywhere
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    But to that intensity, ingrained-ness? That's not how it is in the UK[0] - to anywhere near that degree I mean. edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with
csdffsdfsdfsdfs 6y ago
I fail to see how that person can be blamed for making a video showing how to make pull requests. It's the organizers of the Hacktoberfest who make people look for his tutorial. What's next, blaming people who create "Learning To Program" videos on all the bad code that exists in the world?
- scoutt 6y ago
  > making a video showing how to make pull requests Except when it's a video clearly titled "win free shit" by abusing a system and the means to do it involve a pull request. If I make a video on how-to insurance fraud by setting a car on fire, would you defend me by saying it's just a video about combustion?
ram_rar 6y ago
Its good old Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This culture of submitting a PR to get into conference or get some swag has been there for a while. If I recall correctly, during the peak of openstack summits, it was a requirement to submit some BS PR to show that the engineers contributed to openstack repo.
paule89 6y ago
I am really looking forward for every Hacktoberfest. I try to look for issues, which i can fix with my knowledge. My problem often times is, that i do embedded software and finding an issue here is often times hardware dependend. So now i am looking for other things i might be able to fix. Of course i also want to get my 4th hacktoberfest t-shirt. But i really hate it that people start to spam repositories. Try to fix a real problem, not just changing a name. i gotta say all this shittoberfest hype now really killed my mood and i hope that in the end the 70000 t-shirts will still be enough. Also i did not have the time to start hacking on the 1st october directly. it seems to also be a problem of scale. At first only a select few knew about hacktoberfest. now so many people want to participate, that they try to limit the possible reward. So yeah i hope it is still enough for me and not gone, because too many people gamed the system...
deleted 6y ago
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ramshanker 6y ago
Update on Youtube: Video unavailable. This video is private.
artembugara 6y ago
Gosh, I couldn't understand what is going on. I thought some students from India want to have a PR accepted to a popular repo. Just look t those: https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher/pulls https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher/pulls
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  These are seriously cracking me up. PR: Improve ocs [sic] - + This is an amazing project made to dimplify [sic] things - However, not all topics are supported. + However,not all topics are supported. - We are glad that you liked our package. + We are glad about all those who liked our package.
  - artembugara 6y ago
    I mean really, I have an incredibly long README. They could spend like 20 mins finding some real improvements and I'd accept that.
timvisee 6y ago
Happy to see the guy's YouTube video taken down
02020202 6y ago
reminds me of the leftist thinking where their retarded imaginary world clashes with the reality. lol. guess who is going to win in the end? i doubt it is your imaginary world with your imaginary rules and imaginary expectations.
- dang 6y ago
  Can you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
falcor84 6y ago
> A whole new Twitter account @shitoberfest was created to track this Not looking to discount the severity of the problem in terms of productive time lost, but the use of the word "whole" there wins my overstatement of the year award.
wildpeaks 6y ago
Luckily, Github now has temporary limits settings: https://twitter.com/github/status/1311772722234560517 https://twitter.com/github/status/1311772722234560517 That should help people getting spammed.
exabrial 6y ago
Unfortunately his actions will be used by racists for years to come to justify hate and discrimination. I'm hoping github can quickly step up and ban all accounts that submit spam PRs, to protect the integrity of open source but to also protect people from themselves.
- warmwaffles 6y ago
  > Unfortunately his actions will be used by racists for years to come to justify hate and discrimination. Uh, that's a stretch.
- akashrungta 6y ago
  Already happening in this thread.
thrownaway954 6y ago
"CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him personally." you kind of are there, don't you think?
paultopia 6y ago
Another thing that sucks about this: will this deter people with legitimate improvements to documentation from contributing, for fear of being seen as a spammer? Docs are great, and hard to do, real docs improvements would actually be a serious contribution....
butterisgood 6y ago
Speaking as a white boy who grew up eating flavorless casseroles of frozen junk and leftovers - I too like free t-shirts. (Just want to be part of the crowd throwing their entire groups under the bus)
luord 6y ago
I like reading the end of the post. Good on GitHub's part to give some respite to the developers.
lashkhi 6y ago
Turn off the internet for India, problem solved

787 points by Sandeepg33k 6y ago

cheschire 6y ago

I blame git providers for not giving very fine grained controls to repo owners to limit PRs.

saagarjha 6y ago
The fact that GitHub doesn’t allow you to close pull requests for your project is a very strange choice. There are so many open source mirrors that literally write bots to close pull requests because they don’t accept patches through GitHub…

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

smashah 6y ago

I don't ever merge low effort or self aggrandizing PRs. I just implement the change myself then add the PR person as a contributor on the commit via GitHub desktop.

SirSavary 6y ago

It's convenient that Digital Ocean has a scapegoat for 2020 but his video doesn't explain the previous years of spammy pull requests.

sjrd 6y ago
Absolutely. That guy's video may have caused a lot of spammy PRs, but I'm pretty sure they're far from the majority.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
As a mailserver owner, spam is the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says digitalocean. Malicious bots would be 2nd. I've never learned why DO is a malicious traffic leader. Maybe they're competing with OVH to be the next MCColo.
- Craighead 6y ago
  Or the next bulletproof hosting
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > Maybe they're competing with OVH to be the next MCColo. That's my guess. That was the original value prop, right? MCColo with SSDs on every instance.
- easton 6y ago
  It’s because they made a rather cheap Linux VPS that is extremely easy to get up. It’s 4 clicks on DO (login with GitHub, click new droplet, click $5, click create), vs 15 clicks on Azure or AWS (where you have to create a bespoke account, go through the silly billing configuration, etc) where they expect you're running all of this past your procurement people and that they’ll want to configure stuff too.
tzs 6y ago
Was it much of a problem before this year? Looking back at all prior HN stories with "hacktoberfest" in the title or with "hacktoberfest" and "spam" in the comments, I can't find any that talk about it being a big problem before this year. I found one maintainer who said they got a non-negligible number of garbage pull requests for it, but they still said Hacktoberfest was cool. There was also one post about a filter one project adopted a year ago that used heuristics to identify and automatically reject Hacktoberfest pull requests from new submitters that were too trivial. I'd have expected more if it was a problem to the extent that it seems to be this year.
- asicsp 6y ago
  One of my repos got spam PRs for last two years. So I archived the repo this time before October as a proactive measure. I got spam PRs in other months too, but October was the worst.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Same. I don’t think I got a single spammy PR I could attribute to Hacktoberfest before this year, I had thought it must be people staying inside for COVID or something. But I guess I know the actual cause now.
  - qaisjp 6y ago
    Agreed. We got two this year. Never received a spam PR before.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hobofan 6y ago
If a single person can cause that much harm, it's not their fault, it's the fault of the process/system.

jdminhbg 6y ago

What I don’t get is... why do this for a t-shirt? Am I missing something?

gruez 6y ago
T-shirts are worth significantly more (relatively) in poorer parts of the world. It might be worth 0.5hr of average wage in the us but be worth 5hr of average wage in India.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  I thought of that, but if you’re wealthy enough to watch YouTube and submit PRs on GitHub, is that really that much of a reward?
  - samatman 6y ago
    I think you have this backward. If you had to work for three months to afford your phone, would you be more likely to spend fifteen minutes to get a free shirt, or less?
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    You can be pretty damn poor and do both of those things.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      My entire youth could be described as having all the time in the world but not a dime to my name.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        This was much of my youth too and I grew up in an upper-middle class family in the Bay Area :/ I think this would apply to most children.
  - higerordermap 6y ago

satya71 6y ago

Misaligned incentives always cause trouble, scapegoats not withstanding.

msla 6y ago
> Misaligned incentives always cause trouble, scapegoats not withstanding. Yes. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. Stepping on a soapbox, I think a certain kind of economics thinking should be introduced to students at a reasonably young age, no later than secondary education, that thinking being "Incentive Analysis" where students are taught to think through where various people's and groups' incentives are, and why it matters. If nothing else, it should clear up fuzzy cliche-based thinking which can be misleading even though it has a kernel of truth: "If you aren't paying, you're the product" is wrong in some very important ways, starting with the fact that if you are paying, you might still be the product. For example: You pay for a service, in effect giving the company money for selling your information to other companies eager to have a line on a high-value paying customer.
- pferde 6y ago
  Check your faulty logic there. The statement "if A, then B", does not imply "if not A, then not B". There's nothing wrong with accuracy of "If you aren't paying, you're the product".
  - msla 6y ago
    It isn't my faulty logic.

thrawa567 6y ago

Any sufficient large number of people will behave idiotically (from lat. idiota, ignorant)

triangleman 6y ago
The Latin idiota is borrowed from Greek ἰδιώτης idiōtēs which is from ἴδιος idios meaning "private" or "peculiar". Idiot has historically meant "retarded" so if you wanted to say "ignorantly" you could have just said that, or "idiotically" is fine but don't pretend it has such wholesome roots.

samatman 6y ago

Subtitle: bad idea has predictable consequence.

Google234 6y ago

The shitoberfest Twitter account is hilarious. https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest

neom 6y ago
You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did at DigitalOcean was "just for marketing" - everything we did was because we genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all the vitriol. Maybe it's gone off the rails and needs to be revised or reconsidered, but creating "shitoberfest" twitter and putting things in blog posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive. (I haven't worked at DigitalOcean for 5+ years)
- js2 6y ago
  I think this may be a small example of the path to hell being paved with good intentions, or of unintended consequences.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  > You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it odd that people who had contributed meaningfully to OSS would suggest a numerical bound on PRs as a measure of meaningful contributions. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with. The "bad actors" are assholes, sure, but I think you also need to revise your concepts about meaningful OSS contributions.

robmsmt 6y ago

I don't understand why a person or persons create new repos and merge PRs into each others hello world empty repos. This would be be the optimal solution no?

Google234 6y ago
This is still not fair to real participants. People that cheat the system like that should not get rewarded

rococode 6y ago

GitHub actually released a full feature specifically in response to this spam? That's pretty impressive given that we're still in the first day of this (or maybe great timing if it had already been in development).

Ndymium 6y ago
It already existed but now it allows a full month instead of shorter timespans.
captn3m0 6y ago
It has been asked for many times (extended duration) and was likely in development.

cbanek 6y ago

I feel like this is the ultimate tutorial syndrome. People doing exactly what the video said!

sreevisakh 6y ago
Fact is, we would have done the same after watching his video if we didn't know what PRs and FOSS contributions are. He doesn't explain what PRs are for, or what good PRs look like. He doesn't even teach how to use git for PR - all those spam are using Github's web editor. There is absolutely no clue given about the harm it would cause. For comparison, imagine a hardware DIY tutorial that never mentions any safety concerns.

robmsmt 6y ago

A better idea would be for hacktoberfest to send everyone who has made a 1-line change to a README.md as their PRs to be given a dunces hat instead.

rriepe 6y ago
An entire honeypot conference would be fun.
ackbar03 6y ago
Somehow I think that'd just add oil to the fire. I wouldn't mind a dunce hat from digital Ocean
cvrjk 6y ago
Or maybe they should secretly ship the shirts with a large "spam PR" written on it for those who raised spammy PRs.

teknas 6y ago

Shameless plug: I created a detection script to find and close such spammy PR's. https://github.com/TechieBoy/spamtoberfest https://github.com/TechieBoy/spamtoberfest

midasz 6y ago
Hacktoberfest spam killer - An Amazing Project

lipstone 6y ago

If everything that CodeWithHarry says is true, then I don't see how it's his fault. Also, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Just ignore the spammy emails for a while and close the pull requests.

kgurnani 6y ago
I speak hindi, and in fact he is actually encouraging spam and is BSing in the response. He has said to look for repos with low traffic and do a pull request changing the readme and to do it 20 times, so if most will be marked as invalid, at least 4 wont.
- sbmthakur 6y ago
  One preview image of his video literally said they are distributing free t-shirts, still them. https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311843369077764097?s=19 https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311843369077764097?...
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    This is literally how DigitalOcean is advertising their program, too. It’s just that they intended their audience to be people who fully understood the goal of what this was supposed to be, and the YouTube video was watched by many who didn’t.
faithfulcat 6y ago
Hindi is my native language. CodeWithHarry, in fact, is actually subliminally asking the users to create very low quality PRs. Or at least very heavily implying it. In one part of the video he mentions that last year DO was not able to distribute all the t-shirts as they didn't have enough PRs. He goes on to mention that "this year, we don't want any T-shirts to remain". If I get time, I'll point out more lines from the video where he is promoting PR for the sake of PR. I do agree that it may not be totally his fault in the whole larger context of things.
jabroni_salad 6y ago

higerordermap 6y ago

This is not only kind of spam going on here. A twitter user mentioned that some youtubers are themselves creating assignment aggregation type repos, and encouraging their viewers to contribute some copy paste code to those repos and they approve the pull request. That's insane. I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian.

aexl 6y ago
These type of repositories have existed since the first Hacktoberfest. They might even be useful for beginners to learn how to prepare their first pull request. But the idea of Hacktoberfest is clearly not to submit all your pull requests to such a repository. It even seems as though DigitalOcean is blocking these type of repositories. From the FAQ: My pull request is marked as being on an excluded repository. What does this mean? Unfortunately, your pull request was made on a repository that doesn’t align with the core values of Hacktoberfest. We’ve decided that pull requests made to this repository will not count toward completing the challenge.
obviyus 6y ago
Right there with you. It’s a little disheartening that I hesitate to tell people where I’m based because of the precedent these people have set.
jankotek 6y ago
I would not be too harsh. This way it does not spam normal repos.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
blueblisters 6y ago
> I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian. I don't understand this. You don't have to defend the actions of individual(s) even if they share their nationality with you. It's sufficient to call them out for unacceptable behavior. For people who ascribe this to all Indians, it's on them not on you.

fergie 6y ago

I have a couple of vaguely popular repos on github (~100,000 downloads a month) Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook. If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold. (In the large scheme of things, its really positive that so many people worked out how to make a PR, and were then motivated to do so- lets not shame them too hard. Although occasionally neccessary, we must be mindful about gatekeeping, especially with the young and inexperienced)

jlgaddis 6y ago
Sure, but those types of PRs aren't what's happening here. Check out this PR: https://github.com/OscarZhou/CSharpTraining/pull/1/commits/8e3600fcd5dca8f9f0d16d56237299d893f1aaf6 https://github.com/OscarZhou/CSharpTraining/pull/1/commits/8... How would you like to receive dozens of PRs like that? You would absolutely consider that blatant spam.
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  I think they're referring to one example on Twitter (unfortunately, I can't find it again now) which was calling out a legitimate single-character typo fix. As someone who occasionally likes to report typos, I appreciate someone telling us they're appreciated :)
cbanek 6y ago
I have done one letter typo fixes to doc repos as a 3rd party and felt great about them. One of them was actually a typo in a command line that I found by going through their instructions step by step copying and pasting each line. I was seriously confused when it didn't work!
- dannyw 6y ago
  Yes. Fixing up documentation is always helpful, even if it’s a one letter change! Now, updating “copyright 2018-2019” to “2020” isn’t.

Nezteb 6y ago

I'd much rather spend a minimum of $20 for the t-shirt and have the proceeds go to an open-source project of my choosing (or a pre-selected list of projects).

imtringued 6y ago
Yeah instead of a t-shirt they should give you github sponsor "credits".

Google234 6y ago

Irony: https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/582 https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/582

fpgaminer 6y ago

Glad I saw this article! I got two pull requests on one of my otherwise inactive repos last night. The first one just tweaked one thing in the README pointlessly. Seemed odd, but benign. Then a second one came later; another small silly tweak. Good to know the reason now. Luckily that repo isn't terribly important and was only two pieces of "spam". But I can't imagine the shitstorm real open source projects are going to experience. Either they have to weather the storm or, what, disable PRs for a month? Yikes.

superasn 6y ago

I think this should definitely be opt-in. DO should make a list of participating repos and only PRs to those make you eligible.

trinix912 6y ago
Wouldn't that put too much burden on those repos as all participants would race to submit a PR there?

gjvc 6y ago

This shows the utility of being able to throttle buggy clients.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
But also the difficulty of dealing with distributed buggy/problematic clients. Same reason that fail2ban is less effective against large botnets, password spraying defeats many rate-limits, and abusive NTP use by routers (https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/130209/d-link-firmware-abuses-open-ntp-servers https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/130209/d-link-firmware-a...) is so hard to deal with.

henricao 6y ago

Not fair to say he ruined it. Even if he promoted people creating spam PRs. He exposed the weak foundations for this campaign and hopefully now they will fix it. DO said, it has been 7 years handling spams and they haven't fix the issue. Now it is so visible, that they can't ignore it anymore.

chillee 6y ago

I agree that the spam is problematic, but I feel the need to call out his "data collection". As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says > A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues. and > A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues. ??? Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day? Amazing Project is more relevant, but if you take a look at those issues (sorted by newest), you see that most of the PRs that show aren't spam at all: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project&s=created&type=Issues https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project&s=created... If you want to count how many spam PRs were directly inspired by the video, you can try searching "an amazing project" (with quotes), and filtering by newest. It looks like there have only been about 50 PRs directly inspired by it. https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%22an+amazing+project%22&s=created&type=Issues https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%22an+amazing+project%22&...

TheDong 6y ago
Github allows you to search by dates (newer than, date ranges, etc), so for example, you can add the query "created:>=2020-09-30" (the date the youtube video was uploaded) to get a more accurate list. From this search, it looks like it's definitely on the order of hundreds: https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3E%3D2020-09-30&type=Issues https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3... I opened a few at random to spot-check, and they all seemed like garbage to me. Like this one, ugh https://github.com/mongodb/docs/pull/4402/files https://github.com/mongodb/docs/pull/4402/files
- chillee 6y ago
  Sorting by relevance doesn't get you a representative sample - that bubbles PRs who say "amazing project" in the title to the top(which are indeed mostly spam). If you restrict it to "in:title", you see that there's only 44: https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+amazing+project+created%3A%3E%3D2020-09-30&type=Issues https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+amazing+project+creat... And if you sort by "newest" or "oldest", which provide a more representative sample, you can see that most of them are not spam: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3E%3D2020-09-30&s=created&type=Issues https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project+created%3...

quadrifoliate 6y ago

[edit: Possibly I'm being too hasty in recommending swearing off Open Source contributions. Go forth and contribute, I suppose :) Leaving my original comment below for completeness.] For other South Asian/Indian people like me, a pessimistic but practical counterpoint to this -- if you happen to be Indian and have a username that marks you as such, just lie low for a bit and don't contribute anything; especially during Hacktoberfest. I promise you that this will actually be a net positive for your career. Work on proprietary (aka closed source software) and earn money. Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us in the first place, and the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
higerordermap 6y ago
> the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it. The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this. I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  > I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation. I think that we are in agreement regarding that? I have no right to complain about it either. I can offer advice to bypass Open Source contributions altogether, which would have the side effect of stopping incidents like this. And it's not like projects are starved for README contributions either, coding bootcamps or someone else will pick up the slack.
  - higerordermap 6y ago
    Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example? Let me be clear, when you write open source code there are incentives like creating / improving tool for our own use, experimenting, or having a legitimate contribution, even if it is for sake of resume. The software we want to write as OSS is often not the software we can write as proprietary, sell and make money. Should we give up all the advantages of open source for our side projects? Aren't other people contributing to open source and that's making world better? Should we do a disservice to ourselves and open source community because some people among us have created a bad reputation? It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?

sam1r 6y ago

I don’t get what the big deal of this is. 1-50 PRs with insignificant changes. Simple fix, simple scripting of prs.all().forEach( if pr.MinorChanges, then close w/ comment). Minor changes are just taking the number of diff files, and checking if it’s less than > 1. That’s just one way to do it. Feels like enough venting has been done, but why bring up the problem when you can come forth with a solution. Or at least propose one? Furthermore, does this deserve Twitter attention? How about ours? [hn commubity]

xmprt 6y ago
A lot of minor changes are important though and blanket closing all diffs with minor changes will take out legitimate changes with it. Also, it's so easy to get around this by just making diffs with two files changed. Or making a diff that copy pastes the same line 100 times.

random_visitor 6y ago

Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't. This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week". I guess this was bound to happen since hacktoberfest and similar programs have become so popular. Part of me is sad that some influencer is so careless and rallied 20 something enthusiastic kids to do this and adding another bad incident Indians will be remembered for. Edit: I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile. When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. It's just so much of a convoluted mess, that even the capable students distance themselves from it (convoluted, as in these capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now. And the one club head is a former part of these guys who really hasn't improved in the 2 years after that). Much of this bad guidance contributes to that statistics you see on how "90% of Indian coders are unqualified" Edit 2: (just dropping my reply down the thread from) Someone mentioned that I shouldn't drag other Indians into this. I guess that was bad judgement on my part as it doesn't really matter here, I apologise it I came off as disrespectful to fellow South Asian demographic, that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to bring attention to an underlying issue. We have a lot of bad rep for filling sites like Quora and Medium with loads of low effort content, sending unsolicited messages on LinkedIn and AngelList, and in general bad etiquette in messaging others over the internet. Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populace), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people on how to conduct written communication and how to behave in casual to semi-formal settings in the internet.

6y ago

susam 6y ago

I received two pull requests for two projects on GitHub last night. I am the author of one and the maintainer of the other. At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the pull request (PR) was inconsistent with my preference. There was no explanation whatsoever regarding why this change was warranted. Then I looked at the PR author's profile and found that the same person had submitted several such trivial PRs to other projects too, all of them changing "this" to "the" at some places in README files. It all began to make sense when I looked at the calendar. It was Oct 01. This looked like PR spam due to Hacktoberfest. For now, I just labelled the PRs as "invalid" (as suggested by https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/ https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/), closed the PRs, and moved on. Like all good things created with good intentions on the Internet, spam is hurting this event and bringing bad reputation to it. The possibility of large scale, endless spam should be worked into the design of any new Internet-based event or solution.

ThePhysicist 6y ago
I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the README. Now it makes sense. I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.
- justinclift 6y ago
  Yeah. Best approach I can think of would be something like: Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull Requests on GitHub. :) The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :( Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :) eg combine encouragement for the bit they got right + info on what needs work, and point them in the right direction for fixing it Some people will probably just not be bothered, but others might get involved in the suggested way. Hopefully. :)

SPBS 6y ago

https://mobile.twitter.com/avestura/status/1311753994071666692 https://mobile.twitter.com/avestura/status/13117539940716666... This guy is just straight up begging for a PR merge so that he can get his free T shirt -- I'd wager a good portion of these PR submitters have no idea what they're getting into, they just think they can get a free shirt if they do this according to what the youtube video said.

slimsag 6y ago
Most of them will because Hacktoberfest relies on project maintainers to flag the PR as `invalid` within a certain window and close it, AFAIK. Though I imagine with all the outrage over this that will definitely be changing.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  Wow, that's weird. IIRC the first year the PRs had to be merged for them to count.
  - easton 6y ago
    They said that they didn’t want you to not get credit because you worked for hours on a PR only for it to be not accepted because the maintainers didn’t like it for some reason. Even if that reason was that it wasn’t any work at all. But I think they want people to mark real-bad PRs as spam so they can not count them.

maple3142 6y ago

Is there a reason why some repo get a lot of spam, but some don't? Is there a similarity between repos getting a lot of spam?

tom-_- 6y ago

Spam PRs are frustrating but this rant just reads as petty and vindictive. The author claims that he doesn't "want to cancel or shame him personally", which just rings of false humility considering he named the article "How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020" and then chose to expose his Youtube name repeatedly, something even other frustrated tweeters chose NOT to do. Here's what CodeWithHarry did: He created an example video of submitting a PR to an open source project that repeatedly reminded its viewers to make worthwhile contributions. He then posted a lengthy response to again inform his viewers to NOT submit spammy PRs. He's acting responsibly and in good faith. Does this deserve lynching by the twitter mob? Edit: Yes, the video appears to be mostly about showing kids how to get free swag with open source contributions without too much concern for whether these PRs are worthwhile. But the author of this post is absolutely trying to shame/cancel him personally.

throwaway24324 6y ago
You forget to mention the part where he says "not to spend too much time" on the pull requests.
occamschainsaw 6y ago
I am not sure if it was entirely good faith. In the video he explicitly states (in Hindi) that this is an easy way to get a free t-shirt in few clicks, you don't even need to know anything about GitHub.
_RPL5_ 6y ago
The top comment in this thread (from someone who speaks the language) says that he openly encouraged people to spam meaningless PRs in order to get "free swag." I think the rebuke he is getting is deserved.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Even the title of the video is "How to Earn Free T-Shirt, Swag & Goodies Online!", and the description is in the same vein mostly focusing on getting swag, while seeing (meaningful) PRs as secondary.

gkoberger 6y ago

What a crappy framing. No, one guy didn't ruin it! He was just showing people how to do a PR, and since it was a video, he made a small change. He didn't frame it as cheating; he was just trying to get people into Open Source. Sure, the result is annoying, but it's really unfair to lay this on Harry's feet. This sucks. Everyone involved who was named is just trying to encourage open source.

the_pwner224 6y ago
You are incorrect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas "How to Earn Free T-Shirt, Swag & Goodies Online!"

orliesaurus 6y ago

I have 2 OSS projects [1]: Sadly, 0 PRs. But I have tons of open issues with complaints. As usual, 0 help given. I guess I am just another unappreciated OSS maintainer sad_face [1] https://github.com/orliesaurus?tab=repositories&q=&type=source&language= https://github.com/orliesaurus?tab=repositories&q=&type=sour...

yougaindra 6y ago
don't be sad I raised PR to resolve first issue on first project I saw on your page. cheers. PS : I really wanted to mark your README.md with "An Amazing Project" but I guess there are enough "Amazing Projects" on github for october :P
- orliesaurus 6y ago
  thank you!

stingraycharles 6y ago

Isn’t the solution obvious? DO needs to change the rules, so that all this gamification becomes useless. Either projects opt-in, or they add some qualification to what is an acceptable PR. Of course the Youtuber has a role in this, but I feel like they’re just playing the game; the real solution needs to come from the source of the problems, which is DO.

susam 6y ago

On the topic of pull request (PR) spam originating due to Hacktoberfest, here is some useful information from Hacktoberfest FAQ [1]: "As a maintainer, how should I handle spam pull requests? We dislike seeing spam pull requests just as much as you, so please give them an invalid or spam label and close them. Pull requests that contain a label with the word invalid or spam won't be counted toward Hacktoberfest." It is really quite easy to follow. The 'invalid' label is available by default already, so flagging spam is as simple as selecting that label and closing the PR. See also Hacktober's recent update on reducing spam [2]. [1]: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/ https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/ [2]: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update

saagarjha 6y ago
It’s still work, though. I assume for most people it’s not a big deal, but I have heard of maintainers of many popular projects being inundated with spam-which they, not DigitalOcean-need to deal with.

_RPL5_ 6y ago

When I first heard about Hacktoberfest a few days ago, I thought it was neat. I am relatively new to programming, and as a newbie I got excited that there was an event like this. It prompted me to read about how pull requests work, and to research several open source projects that I could contribute to. I haven't made any contributions yet, but it's on my to-do list for October. I suppose you can already count me as one of the beneficiaries of this program, simply because it got me to learn new things. I think Hacktoberfest is a good idea, speed bumps like this one notwithstanding.

jp0d 6y ago

I've reported his video as a spam. He is promoting his fraudulent methods to teach people how to get a free t-shirt at the cost of the wonderful open source software community. I wrote the following in the details of the spam report. To be honest, I don't think he is a bad person. He probably didn't think that his video would cause this. But as a decent human being, the least he could do is take down that video. ``` This video is promoting and teaching people how to get a free t-shit by showing them how to do spam pull request. These requests have flooded real world open source projects on Github. This is ruining the community's efforts. ```

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dreamcompiler 6y ago

Human botnet (Humannet?) DDOS attack coordinated via Youtube. That's kind of a new one. Edit: Wait...I can get T-shirts for PR'S? Somehow I missed that memo. Is this retroactive? /s

unlimit 6y ago

Being from India, his videos did show up on my recommendations. And I have opened some of them. The tone of the videos are bit off for me. He has some photo copyed written notes that everyone does in colleges in India. Needless to say I never could go beyond these display of notes. After doing all these programming videos, he then started doing laptop recommendations and what not. But I never expected this. I mean there are lot of simple tech videos coming out of India some good some bad but I never expected to see encouragement of such kind of behaviour. But I have also seen videos by Indian "gurus" who preach how to get free websites on github, without understanding what github really is.

saos 6y ago

> This flood of low quality PR spam appears to come from a YouTuber with an audience of 672K where he demonstrates how easy it is to make a Pull Request to a repo. > Where he went wrong was demonstrating a low quality PR, thus setting the bar low for his viewers who went on to copy exactly what he did. This is the problem on the industry today. All these “how to...” and no depth

dang 6y ago

Is this the same story as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894? what's the difference?

slimsag 6y ago
This would be a continuation of that story, where someone did investigation into the cause. The original story you linked did not have a cause mentioned/found at the time it was posted.
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we'll leave the current thread up then. Thanks!

LockAndLol 6y ago

Why can't Digital Ocean, this youtuber and Github just work together to make the world a little bit better? It's OK not to be perfect, but they can acknowledge their mistakes and work together to improve them. DigitalOcean could work with maintainers to allow registration and get some kind of participation icon for maintainers to put on their repo. Maintainers, Github and Digital Ocean could work together to define parameters of acceptance for PRs (maybe an integration?). The YouTube could then become the face of the thing for India and show people how to make a meaningful PR on a digital ocean repo. It would also serve as an ad for them. Just be nice to each other...

encom 6y ago

If CloudFlare thinks you're a bot, like me: https://archive.ph/0F5nz https://archive.ph/0F5nz

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

I've made an amazing project for people who need to make amazing pull requests, they can do it here https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject Now I guess I will have to make some sort of solution that autorejects anything that doesn't have the word amazing (or some synonym for amazing, I'm not a tyrant) on edit: hmm, there's a typo in the Readme, a good start.

shanecp 6y ago

Because everything goes through Github, can't they add a simple spam detector? Let's say if the the user doesn't have many PRs in profile, and sending a lot of them within 24 hours. Sounds like it will be a lot easier for github bot to flag these.

dathinab 6y ago

Through given that people where already afraid of it before that video aired I belive it was already a mess and just got worst.

zzo38computer 6y ago

"There's almost no limits, so if your request is merged into any Open Source repository, you qualify. Amazing." Well, not all open source software is using git, and even some that is, doesn't use GitHub. Also, how do they see if you qualify, really? (Do you need a GitHub account? The linked document doesn't seem to say that, or if it does, it isn't very clear.) (Anyways, I wouldn't want to submit a pull request merely for the purpose of the shirt. I would ignore that when making such a thing. If I get a shirt too (and I do not already have enough shirts, although I think I do have enough shirts), then that is a bonus, I suppose.) (I do not use git myself. I think I have never received any patches to my software, except maybe one, but I do not really remember if it is or not. I have, however, merged in other people's changes when I found them, although these aren't requests. Actually, other people have sometimes merged in some of my changes too despite not being a pull request, too. How will that ever count?) Hopefully, it can be explained better.

kstenerud 6y ago

One guy didn't ruin it. This is a classic case of the cobra effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect). DigitalOcean, like the British, had good intentions, but didn't think this through to its logical conclusion.

masklinn 6y ago
It has been a recurring issue in previous years. It’s apparently worse this time but they were very much notified, they simply do not care.

moonshinefe 6y ago

I mean, I don't condone what the youtuber did, but I'm not sure who the author is trying to kid here. "I don't think he's a bad person and don't want to shame him. > Literally writes an essay on his very public blog shaming the guy and showing his username/channel repeatedly

CGamesPlay 6y ago
When we review a serious flaw which caused downtime in production, we aren’t wishy-washy around who and what caused the failure. However, it’s expected that everyone knows it’s a mistake and not deliberate and that there will be an effort to improve and rectify the situation.

grey-area 6y ago

Simple fix for hacktoberfest maintainers - make it opt-in. Only merged PRs with the tag hacktoberfest from maintainers should count. It's absurd that even closed prs count, and absurd they put the burden on maintainers to actively flag spam and auto-include all repos, many repos simply don't want changes of any kind. Yes this means it won't apply to lots of repos and less people will be involved. That's ok.

junon 6y ago

Oh so this is what's happening to my repos. I maintain one that gets ~60 million downloads a week, and is usually the first thing people run to for help when something unrelated goes wrong. This is nothing new, though the volume has increased a bit.

compsciphd 6y ago

If people wanted to farm a t-shirt, just create your own public github repo and make PRs to it. No need to spam real repos.

agustif 6y ago

Couldn't some brighter coder than me make an action/bot for github that automatically closes/dismisses/marks as invalid such trivial and spam PR's?

hacker_ranch 6y ago

I found this project -- https://github.com/DeepfriedDev/hacktober-is https://github.com/DeepfriedDev/hacktober-is -- who is just accepting any pull request as an attempt to somewhat deflect some of the Hacktober spam.

sreevisakh 6y ago
That assumes that the spammers know what they are doing. They are just following a video. Many of them probably are clueless about even what Github is for.

piokoch 6y ago

The point is that this is not just a problem of Hacktoberfest - there are some automatic quality assurance tools that check if libraries used in project does not have bugs and they do this also by searching GitHub for reported bugs. If there is a reported and unfixed bug, library is marked as not safe. It happened several times that there was a reported bug, which was totally bogus or added by mistake (added to wrong project for instance), however repo owner hasn't closed it, so the tool gave false positive. Obviously said tool allowed adding exception rules, etc. but I can't imagine how annoying it would be if there were hundreds of such crappy reports and it seems we are going in that direction. This looks like another consequence of globalization and leaving in the "global village", everyone can jump in into someones village and do harm over there and it is hard to get rid or somehow punish such unwanted visitors. People would do a lot to gain 15 minutes of fame, even if this is just wearing some t-shirt. Maybe that is not a big surprise, some people beat their parents or girlfriends or boyfriends and put that on Youtube for fame and money - whole "pato" streamers market is built around this (with said victims participating in the show to earn even more money).

pritambarhate 6y ago

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India. * "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming". Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how. * Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be. Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway. So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy [2] https://unacademy.com/ https://unacademy.com/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I

jokethrowaway 6y ago
I wouldn't say it's an Indian only phenomenon, plenty of that everywhere
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  But to that intensity, ingrained-ness? That's not how it is in the UK[0] - to anywhere near that degree I mean. edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with

csdffsdfsdfsdfs 6y ago

I fail to see how that person can be blamed for making a video showing how to make pull requests. It's the organizers of the Hacktoberfest who make people look for his tutorial. What's next, blaming people who create "Learning To Program" videos on all the bad code that exists in the world?

scoutt 6y ago
> making a video showing how to make pull requests Except when it's a video clearly titled "win free shit" by abusing a system and the means to do it involve a pull request. If I make a video on how-to insurance fraud by setting a car on fire, would you defend me by saying it's just a video about combustion?

ram_rar 6y ago

Its good old Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This culture of submitting a PR to get into conference or get some swag has been there for a while. If I recall correctly, during the peak of openstack summits, it was a requirement to submit some BS PR to show that the engineers contributed to openstack repo.

paule89 6y ago

I am really looking forward for every Hacktoberfest. I try to look for issues, which i can fix with my knowledge. My problem often times is, that i do embedded software and finding an issue here is often times hardware dependend. So now i am looking for other things i might be able to fix. Of course i also want to get my 4th hacktoberfest t-shirt. But i really hate it that people start to spam repositories. Try to fix a real problem, not just changing a name. i gotta say all this shittoberfest hype now really killed my mood and i hope that in the end the 70000 t-shirts will still be enough. Also i did not have the time to start hacking on the 1st october directly. it seems to also be a problem of scale. At first only a select few knew about hacktoberfest. now so many people want to participate, that they try to limit the possible reward. So yeah i hope it is still enough for me and not gone, because too many people gamed the system...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ramshanker 6y ago

Update on Youtube: Video unavailable. This video is private.

artembugara 6y ago

Gosh, I couldn't understand what is going on. I thought some students from India want to have a PR accepted to a popular repo. Just look t those: https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher/pulls https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher/pulls

hombre_fatal 6y ago
These are seriously cracking me up. PR: Improve ocs [sic] - + This is an amazing project made to dimplify [sic] things - However, not all topics are supported. + However,not all topics are supported. - We are glad that you liked our package. + We are glad about all those who liked our package.
- artembugara 6y ago
  I mean really, I have an incredibly long README. They could spend like 20 mins finding some real improvements and I'd accept that.

timvisee 6y ago

Happy to see the guy's YouTube video taken down

02020202 6y ago

reminds me of the leftist thinking where their retarded imaginary world clashes with the reality. lol. guess who is going to win in the end? i doubt it is your imaginary world with your imaginary rules and imaginary expectations.

dang 6y ago
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

falcor84 6y ago

> A whole new Twitter account @shitoberfest was created to track this Not looking to discount the severity of the problem in terms of productive time lost, but the use of the word "whole" there wins my overstatement of the year award.

wildpeaks 6y ago

Luckily, Github now has temporary limits settings: https://twitter.com/github/status/1311772722234560517 https://twitter.com/github/status/1311772722234560517 That should help people getting spammed.

exabrial 6y ago

Unfortunately his actions will be used by racists for years to come to justify hate and discrimination. I'm hoping github can quickly step up and ban all accounts that submit spam PRs, to protect the integrity of open source but to also protect people from themselves.

warmwaffles 6y ago
> Unfortunately his actions will be used by racists for years to come to justify hate and discrimination. Uh, that's a stretch.
akashrungta 6y ago
Already happening in this thread.

thrownaway954 6y ago

"CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him personally." you kind of are there, don't you think?

paultopia 6y ago

Another thing that sucks about this: will this deter people with legitimate improvements to documentation from contributing, for fear of being seen as a spammer? Docs are great, and hard to do, real docs improvements would actually be a serious contribution....

butterisgood 6y ago

Speaking as a white boy who grew up eating flavorless casseroles of frozen junk and leftovers - I too like free t-shirts. (Just want to be part of the crowd throwing their entire groups under the bus)

luord 6y ago

I like reading the end of the post. Good on GitHub's part to give some respite to the developers.

lashkhi 6y ago

Turn off the internet for India, problem solved