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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.

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.