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> 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 co
by xuki 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 don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of its existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did at DigitalOcean was "just marketing" - everything we did was because we all genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a real shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all this 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 find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused, and wasted time of hundreds of maintainers who now have to clean up their repo. Did "the room" consider this, at all, and what if they did, what was the conclusion?
Edit: I added neom's original comment, still have it on my browser.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoYeah, this really makes me wonder what the room gets up to during threat modelling session at Digital Ocean. But perhaps they don’t do that sort of thing.
- zeofig 6y agoExactly what I thought. I don't really care that digital ocean had "good intentions". The scheme is obviously abuseable and seems to have indeed wasted the time of a number of actual developers.
- neom 6y agoWhy do you think hundreds of maintainers have to clean up their repos? What is your acceptable ratio of misuse to value add?
- Andoryuuta 6y agoTo be honest, we are well beyond hundreds of maintainers that will need to clean up their repos. I've been crawling the "Improve Docs" spam issues since they started appearing. As far as I'm aware, there are already 4500+ repos which have had a low quality, single-line-change, "Improve Docs" PR opened in the past two days. Just to pull out a few repos out for example purposes: * 7 spam - https://github.com/seductivegeese/softi.es https://github.com/seductivegeese/softi.es * 8 spam - https://github.com/easydepot/websiteSwallower/pulls https://github.com/easydepot/websiteSwallower/pulls * 8 spam - https://github.com/tokio-rs/website https://github.com/tokio-rs/website * 13 spam - https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website * 15+ spam - https://github.com/pyvec/elsa https://github.com/pyvec/elsa * 15+ spam - https://github.com/justicedemocrats/candidate-website https://github.com/justicedemocrats/candidate-website * 15+ spam - https://github.com/Salamek/blacklist https://github.com/Salamek/blacklist * 20+ spam - https://github.com/openmaptiles/www.openmaptiles.org https://github.com/openmaptiles/www.openmaptiles.org * 25+ spam - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitzjs.com https://github.com/blitz-js/blitzjs.com * 60+ spam - https://github.com/EdmontonPy/edmontonpy https://github.com/EdmontonPy/edmontonpy Heck, take look at the PRs and commit history of https://github.com/azmat21/UyghurWebsiteCrawler https://github.com/azmat21/UyghurWebsiteCrawler. It's been two days into October, and this repo has gotten 55 PRs. It hasn't ever gotten a single PR before this as far as I can tell.
- neom 6y agoNot to be pedantic but I think there is some conflation here between PR/repo and maintainer? How do you define "low quality" hacktoberfest was originally also focused on people learning to code who could help clean up docs/fix typos etc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xuki 6y agoSo it was a net positive thing, and the suffering of some maintainers are acceptable, just so DigitalOcean can slap its name and claim it helps opensource? Just donate money or something man. Jesus fucking christ.
- josteink 6y ago> I find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused As someone completely unaffiliated with Hacktoberfest (only attendee over several years), my impression is that there really haven’t been much issues with it until this year. I’m quite confident it was all done in good faith. Unlike all those shit, SPAM PRs.