9 ms·

Hacktoberfest Is Now Opt-In

262 points by gmemstr 6y ago

google234123 6y ago
I posted something similar in the other thread about this. This change probably kills Hacktoberfest imo. What maintainers would want to subject themselves to spam PRs by opting-in. Anyway, I feel like allowing PRs before this point to count as valid is a bad idea. I would guess that 70k people already submitted 4 spam PRs in their own repo by now following the tutorials that have been posted for this.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I have a Pebble smartwatch app[1] that only I have ever worked on (aside from one PR to change an icon). I don't really expect anyone else to contribute, but it would be neat. I just opted it in to Hacktoberfest. Best case scenario, I actually get a great PR because someone was looking for Hacktoberfest-eligible repos and thought my app looked cool. Worst-case scenario, I get a bunch of spam PRs that I reject—but since I basically never get any PRs, this doesn't seem like such a huge problem. [1]: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Pebble-RSS-Reader https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Pebble-RSS-Reader
  - throwahtbfest 6y ago
    > Worst-case scenario, I get a bunch of spam PRs that I reject—but since I basically never get any PRs, this doesn't seem like such a huge problem. That's what I thought. Now I'm getting spammed with PRs containing personal insults. Take care.
  - gerogerke 6y ago
    I suggest adding the hacktobefest label to issues you'd like to see tackled. Many people search for `label:hacktoberfest language:Rust is:open` or the likes to find projects to contribute to. I have not found a way to search for repos with a repo-tag yet.
    - account42 6y ago
      > I have not found a way to search for repos with a repo-tag yet. https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest
- askmike 6y ago
  > This change probably kills Hacktoberfest imo. I'd say the spam tactics executed on such a large scale killed Hacktoberfest. This is just damage control.
- leonidasv 6y ago
  Repos were being tagged as hacktoberfest-friendly by maintainers long before it was mandatory.
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  I personally wouldn't participate in Hacktoberfest after this. I'd never want to be seen wearing the t-shirt they'd give out after all the spam and drama. At this point wearing it would probably give the wrong impression to the people who are actually invested in OSS.
fortran77 6y ago
I'll create some repos that are nothing but /* comments */ and welcome any and all pull requests! This way everyone can be an FOSS contributor and win t-shirts and stickers.
- amrrs 6y ago
  If you had read Hacktoberfest's previous blog post on this matter. They even encouraged those spammers to create a repo on their own github account and create 4 PRs within those repos just to get qualified for the T-shirts but I think anyways the damage has been done and by providing T-shirts to those spammers they're not penalizing their behavior any ways.
  - kjsthree 6y ago
    I imagine a sea of furrowed brows aimed at those showing up to conferences wearing a Hacktoberfest shirt.
  - olodus 6y ago
    I don't really get why that is a bad thing. It is better that they do it there, on their own repos, than spam maintainers as it is right now. And you want people to learn how to make a repo and do PRs right? Let's have them practice on their own. Do you really need the t-shirt to be some mark of super-hackers?
    - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
      It sounds like that just moves the spam from worthless PRs to worthless repos, which may even be more harmful in the long-run.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        Worthless repos are fine. Microsoft can afford the storage costs and the long tail is already long and doesn't bother anyone.
- 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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maple3142 6y ago
I think it is better to take a hybrid approach to this. Make newly created accounts can only contribute to #Hacktoberfest repos, and older account can still contribute to any repository while still being counted.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  I'm not sure about that. Almost every developer I know has a GitHub account so I assume most people including spammers finding out about Hacktoberfest would already have an account that qualifies.
  - pininja 6y ago
    To draw out a hypothesis: existing accounts with real names and projects may value their reputation enough to not spam. Perhaps a reasonable line of thinking is spam accounts are newly created “anonymous” accounts. I haven’t looked, so I don’t know if there is any correlation. It’s an imperfect filter for spammers since of course anonymous accounts already exist.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      "Real" names are even easier to write than spam PRs. Sincerely, John Smith
- kardos 6y ago
  So what do you do to fend off the accounts created this year to get around this rule next year?
aloknnikhil 6y ago
> https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#quality https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#quality The quality standards are so low, I am honestly not surprised by the amount of spam this has generated. > Last but not least, one pull request to fix a typo is fine, but 5 pull requests to remove a stray whitespace is not. https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#spam https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#spam And to make matters worse, the onus falls on the maintainer to mark a PR as spam. This honestly feels like a DDoS attack on open-source rather than promoting open-source. I don't think there's any way to save this. EDIT: I think DigitalOcean completely missed the point on promoting open-source. It's not about the PRs. It's about everything that goes before you submit your first PR. Reading mailing lists. Actively participating in discussions with the maintainers. Reading the docs. It seems like they wanted an easy way out to promote their brand without putting in the effort to review the PRs and filtering out spam by raising the bar on what qualifies for a PR (i.e. not requiring all the leg-work for writing your first PR).
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Does GitHub allow an user to be marked as a spammer?
  - google234123 6y ago
    All the users called on the r/programming thread about this were banned by github.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      What does "called" mean here? Called out for spamming?
  - aloknnikhil 6y ago
    I think this is the closest thing you can do https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/blocking-a-user-from-your-personal-account https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-communit... https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/blocking-a-user-from-your-organization https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-communit... But that still means maintainers have to build an active list of blocked users. That's definitely not scalable.
deleted 6y ago
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tehlike 6y ago
This hacktoberfest reminds me of rats of hanoi incident, an example of a measure becoming a target. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902.amp https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
- makeupsomething 6y ago
  Yes it reminded me of a similar story about snakes in India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
ryanar 6y ago
I applaud what D.O. has done in a very short time to try and fix this with the community. I do however think that this could also backfire. I entirely agree with the comment made on the PR by sylveon https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/596#issuecomment-702986348 https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/596#issue... I'm not a fan of this change because: - It significantly reduces the pool of repos that you can PR to. I've contributed to repos which haven't explicitly opted in to Hacktoberfest this year and in the past as well. Repos in which I am more comfortable contributing in than some random GitHub search result for the "hacktoberfest" tag. With this change, I am forced to look into those, or convince the maintainers to tag their repos. - For intermediate or experienced programmers it voids the whole event because the vast majority of OSS projects won't get involved. - After the spam fest that this year was, people aren't inclined to add the tag to their repos because it paints a target for spam over them. - Maintainers can now gatekeep your contributions, so even if it's something meaningful the maintainer can deny you a +1 PR for your work. It can be frustrating spending a non-insignificant amount of time to get the t-shirt the right way and then have that time nullified. - It doesn't address "hello world" spam repos. In fact, it encourages them because of the reduced amount of repos available to contribute to.
- franciscop 6y ago
  > With this change, I am forced to look into those, or convince the maintainers to tag their repos. That is a very false premise. You can help any open source project! That's the spirit of open source! It'll make things better for you and for others. Now, if you want that free t-shirt, sure there are rules. But no one is "forcing" you not to contribute to OSS. All of the points here seem based on this false premise.
  - smbullet 6y ago
    > But no one is "forcing" you not to contribute to OSS. The GP is talking about Hacktoberfest... Not sure how you got the impression that they are talking about OSS in general.
    - 6y ago
janee 6y ago
I would even take it a step further and allow maintainers the ability to cherry pick certain issues they'd like to put up for hacktober. I'd still keep the repo wide tag for opt-in, but also optionally provide issue level opt-in. Alternatively, you can provide a platform where participants can self regulate...e.g. like spammers called out on r/programming or maybe a spam detection algo. Edit: maybe the incentives can also be altered. E.g. sticker for non opt-in repos, t-shirt for opt-in ones. Hmm solving bad actor behaviour is an interesting problem
- bbrazil 6y ago
  > I would even take it a step further and allow maintainers the ability to cherry pick certain issues they'd like to put up for hacktober. At least for Prometheus the ones we tagged with hacktoberfest are ones we'd expect a new developer to have a good chance to be able to complete. I don't think we should be disincentive people who attempt to instead tackle more thorny issues.
domenicd 6y ago
I'm cautiously optimistic about this. This is what Hacktoberfest should have been from the start. A company incentivizing pull requests against your repo should require your consent. A maintainer needs to affirmatively sign up for this sort of work; they can't have it thrust upon them. As a maintainer, all the other half-measures people have suggested (e.g., accepted PRs only; account age measurements; filtering out README changes) do not actually reduce the unasked-for burden on me. That said, I'm not sure this year can be salvaged. It's not clear whether all the existing spammers will get the message. I hope DigitalOcean emails all folks signed up to notify them of this change. (They haven't communicated any of their changes so far in such a way.) Notably, a day ago, the DigitalOcean staff thought this wouldn't make a difference. [1] And it's even possible this will just result in issue spam begging maintainers to add the Hacktoberfest topic. But it's also possible that this will work out. The best version of this is that low-quality contributors looking for a t-shirt get directed toward honeypot repositories, and folks interested in making substantial contributions will continue using issue labels like GitHub's own "good first issue", or the Hacktoberfest repository topic, to find places to contribute. We'll see in a day or two whether this is enough. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648285
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  > A company incentivizing pull requests against your repo should require your consent. Why?
  - dannyr 6y ago
    Do you really have to ask "why"?
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I do. It sounds really weird to me. The whole concept of pull requests is that anyone can make them.
      - dannyr 6y ago
kardos 6y ago
Switching to opt-in is the right call here to limit any further damage. Meanwhile, it's painfully obvious that the whole thing is aimed to be a "low-touch" / "fully automated" campaign where the participation rules are designed around that goal. Makes sense -- it's easy to scale, etc. However now it's clear that the outcome is the polar opposite of GSoC, where participating in GSoC has prestige and produces high quality oss contributions, and it's facing an unwinnable battle against an internet army looking for the minimum effort end-run around the rules to extract a tshirt... So, my take is that DO should take a longer view and try to raise the profile of Hacktoberfest by making it more exclusive -- eg take a step toward GSoC. For ex, there are a handful of oss-bounty sites (bountysource, issuehunt, etc) where people post bounties for things they want implemented. Could DO partner here in some fashion? Such as matching bounties in a certain range ($10<x<$50?) with a tshirt? Or matching bounties? Make it a year-round promo instead of one month?
- dmurray 6y ago
  The cognitive dissonance here is that DO want to give the low-quality contributors a t-shirt. These are Indian students with good hustle and poor technical skills who market themselves as technologists. They're going to be managers making purchasing decisions at tech companies in a few years time, and they lack the technical sophistication to choose between DO and competitors on axes other than "I've heard of them"/"they have a good reputation"/"they gave me a t-shirt once". These customers are both more valuable and a thousand times more numerous than the ones capable of earning even a $10 bug bounty. I'm generalising here, but hopefully not racially stereotyping too much.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    So in your mind, hacktoberfest's marketing strategy isn't "let's sponsor a big public pro open source event so we get lots of good rep especially among open source enthusiasts and potential hires"... But instead it's some weird ass 5 year long-play betting that random indian students will, in the future, have purchasing power to choose Digital Ocean because they got a free shirt half a decade prior. "Generalising" isn't the word I would use.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
Excellent. Reading the PR notes on how it'll now work, this sounds imminently sensible: - projects can opt in by adding a keyword to their project description on github for a month. That's barely any effort for projects that care, and - PRs that are merged won't count unless the project maintainers welcome hacktober contributions and are willing to add a label that marks a PR as "this one counts". And if "not getting a $20 T-shirt for free" is the only thing making a difference between you contributing a meaningful PR to a project, and not contributing a PR at all, then let's face it: the open source world really isn't worse off.
- sofixa 6y ago
  Isn't it worst off? It's a meaningful contribution worse off. Do you take the same stance with people who are paid to make OSS contributions?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Those people are paid for in-demand fixes, not for pushing their PRs on people.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    A project not getting a PR that it would otherwise also not have gotten is nothing lost.
JustARandomGuy 6y ago
Glad I completed my Hacktoberfest requirements earlier; a little bummed that the shirt will invariably = low quality contributors. A better way to do this IMO would be to kick off a year long contest; for example: you sign up, every week you need to average +7 lines of code on your own repo. Bonus points if the repo actually does something useful. After a year of that, you get a Tshirt. Weeds out the lazy, encourages people to actually build something.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  This would encourage me to automate adding 7 lines every month. Not sure if that would be in line with the goal :)
throwahtbfest 6y ago
I created an issue on one of my repos. It's a really simple set of scripts that manipulate some muni data. I asked for an update from stale data sources/scripts to more recent stuff. Exactly the sort of thing that's great for a first-time contributor -- zero dependencies, small code base, well-scoped issue. I could do it myself in ~10 minutes of work, but figured it'd be a nice chance for someone else to get a first experience working with GH and maybe get a free shirt. I got one PR that did exactly what I asked. Great, merged! Good experience all around -- exactly what I expected! Then I marked a PR "invalid" because they made changes to a README that weren't helpful (in fact, actively misleading!). Clearly low-effort PR spam. BTW, the same low-effort PR spam I'm also getting on a bunch of other repos where I didn't solicit help. And now, because I marked unsolicited incorrect changes to a README file as "invalid", I'm getting new pull requests calling me an asshole. So... that's my experience with Hacktoberfest. I guess it's my fault for assuming the outcome would be anything else in the month after the Eternal September. Especially with free t-shirts on the line.
dayjobpork 6y ago
As a full time software documentation writer, all I ever do on github is correct docs and text (because nothing looks more unprofessional than terrible spelling, especially in your UI, expect maybe for when the directions are wrong and don't work) I've just checked and am now running at over 40 rejected changes, many with really offensive comments added to them. Open source developers often come across as very rude and argumentative and this sort of response to legitimate fixes kills any interest I had in helping. Looking through some of the projects I they are also treating code changes the same way. I'd suggest that that future hacktoberfests will have much less participation
- bgdam 6y ago
  As someone who can't be bothered to fix such stuff in documentation, I would like to wholeheartedly thank you for doing this. Please do not get discouraged by the fallout from the Hacktoberfest mess, people everywhere seem to be short on patience right now. I'd suggest taking a break, and maybe start giving PRs next month :)
- lichtenberger 6y ago
  If you encounter spelling errors or grammatical issues, please help fixing on https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix and https://sirix.io https://sirix.io :-) I'm no native english speaker, so I'd be very happy if people fix stuff.
- temikus 6y ago
  As an OSS maintainer I’m _very_ happy when people correct my spelling/formatting and make the docs look better. Please don’t let a couple of twats ruin your motivation. What you’re doing is really good for the community!
wa11f10wer 6y ago
I'm a participant with 2 PRs merged so far. I totally support the opt-in mode, but at the same time discouraged from continuing further (contributing to repos with the hacktoberfest topic, not open source in general). 1. I think the opt-in should have been there at the start. Repo maintainers should have been informed, and given ample time to decide if they want to participate or not, so that participants are likely to have a wider range of repos to choose from. From the organiser's POV, it will help them to measure the impact of this event on open source events. However, this doesn't seem to be planned at the start (didn't happen in the past years either?) The explanation I can think of is that either they didn't have a nice talk with GitHub to get their support, or like many ppl have said, it's more of a publicity stunt. 2. It could have been done with better communication. If not for this HN thread, I wouldn't have known the change in rules. No email sent. Even the official website still has rule sections that say any public repo will work. 3. I'm discouraged to participate further. I do love the t-shirt. I'd be lying to say that I wasn't motivated by the shirt from the start. I also wanted to beat the crowd by making PRs early by sacrificing my time for other hobbies/work. However, I made PRs that are welcomed and the maintainers were happy to merge. But now I feel the shirt will only bring me the suspicion and disgrace of potentially being a spammer. 4. I don't have many choices of repo to contribute now. In the hacktoberfest topic, there's 0 repo in my preferred language. The first repo I see with the highest number of stars is some algo repo. The 2 repos I've contributed and likely to contribute again are not qualifies anymore. There are still good things from my experience. I have made PRs before, but I'm not actively contributing. I'd rather spend my free time on other hobbies. But now, I do see that I can find joy in open source. I'm likely to contribute to repos that interest me again in the future.
- bblough 6y ago
  You're not alone. I understand why this change is needed - jerks often ruin things. But I hope that DO will refine the approach a bit, as opt-in-only will probably kill Hacktoberfest for me. The intersection of projects that I use or care about, the projects that are in a language that I'm interested in using (or even learning), the projects that are on github, and the projects that will actually opt in even after the events of the last few days, well... I'm guessing that set is going to be pretty small. Quite frankly I don't want to spend more time searching/scrolling through github trying to find contributions to make than I do actually contributing. Of course, none of that probably matters, as I realize I'm not the target audience for Hacktoberfest: I regularly contribute to open source projects. Whether or not I get a t-shirt won't change that, but I'm not going to lie - I've enjoyed getting the shirts (and stickers!), and wear them often. They can be good conversation starters, and it's also nice to have a tangible reminder of my contributions, since so much of what we do in this field is completely intangible. Though, to your point, the potential implications of the t-shirts going forward may change my feelings on wearing them. And I completely agree w/r/t to communication. Earlier today I made a PR and refreshed my Hacktoberfest profile to make sure it picked it up, only to see it marked as not valid due to not being in an approved repository. So I went looking for an explanation and eventually wound up in this thread. As you noted, there was no mention of it on the site, no email, etc. There also doesn't appear to be a contact email listed anywhere on the Hacktoberfest site.
franga2000 6y ago
For the past few years, I've made this tradition of working a bit harder in September so I can have more free time in October and make all the contributions I've been meaning to make. I never made the PRs specifically to get the shirt, they were things I wanted to do at some point and the shirt was a good incentive to actually get them done. Just like past years, I have a similar todo list with 10-or-so items this year and started working on it yesterday. All of the contributions I have planned have had open issues for a while and I've discussed them with the maintainers for sometimes months. Now none of them will count towards the shirt. And I want that god damn shirt! I know it's stupid, but it was really nice to get something sorta-exclusive for doing something good for the open-source community, even if my contributions weren't particularly groundbreaking. I'd gladly pay shipping costs if necessary (actually, I think that would be a good anti-spam measure). But now I'll have to spend more time looking for tagged projects to contribute to and probably end up not finishing some of my planned PRs.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  A sincere "thank you" from a good person such as an open source project maintainer means so much more to me than a consumerist t-shirt. Your comment reminded me of a 1-word PR I sent that fixed a bug in a project, and it gives me a glow in my stomach thinking about now, months later. You can go on cafe press and by yourself any t-shirt you want.
INTPenis 6y ago
I only heard of hacktoberfest this year and as soon as I saw the website my first thought was "this is going to be abused". I'm honestly surprised they didn't see it. Github has become like a social media of programming. Even before I heard of hacktoberfest I had noticed people building hollow or shallow profiles on github to attract employers. Most recruiters won't go deeper than your profile, so they'll see a bunch of contributions but those might just be Issues created, PRs rejected or documentation adjustments.
greatgib 6y ago
Good change! With a more limited base of oss projects that opt-in, at least it can give them publicity in exchange for accepting the possible burden of bad new / single-shot contributors
wildpeaks 6y ago
If you want to opt-in but worry about spam, one compromise can be to temporarily limit interactions to previous contributors only: this way, it rewards people who help the rest of the year.
gregoriol 6y ago
This seems like a quickfix idea and doesn't provide a good incentive for open-source projects: in that configuration, it requires additional knowledge (of the rules) and work (tags, ...) from repository maintainers, just so some people can get a tshirt, not sure it's worth it. They should have acknowledged their failure and cancelled the game altogether.
- josteink 6y ago
  > just so some people can get a tshirt, not sure it's worth it. That’s looking at things a wee bit one-dimensional isn’t it? Until this year Hacktoberfest has been a fun event where people of all levels of skill has learned how one can help out in open-source projects. They have learned how to fork, make changes and propose that those changes get upstreamed. You may take these skills for granted, but they first needs to be learnt. They have learnt what sort of reception to expect based on how they have presented their changes to the upstream repo and/or maintainers and how to adjust it based on a feedback and consensus. You may take this experience for granted, but it needs to come from somewhere. In both these respects Hacktoberfest has helped. Looking at entire Hacktoberfest and what it has done over all its years as simply a t-shirt because some Indian spammers tried to game the system for that single price this single year is absolutely not fair. > They should have acknowledged their failure and cancelled the game altogether. You should acknowledge that such confrontational attitude and vitriol won’t do the discussion any good. You could come up with all kinds of constructive criticism here instead, but that might take some effort on your part. It will get you a more fruitful discussion though. Disclaimer: Maintainer for various projects and Hacktoberfest attendee.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
I love that this whole situation is analogous do the dimishing status-signaling-value of a college degree due to grade inflation and admissions scams, but it's about diminishing the status value of a t-shirt.
pietromenna 6y ago
I think for next edition: - Maintainers should create a month ahead opt-in and list some good issues for hacktoberfest. This means, we agree to help you start on OSS and have something which is meaninful for us listed. - A browsable list of projects which opted in. So you can look for projects to contribute. - It will look something more like GSoC. - What I think it would be great is if maintainers are willing to mentor newcomers so they are able to help more in the future, not only on a given october timeframe.
LockAndLol 6y ago
No matter what happens, there'll be a vocal minority complaining about this too. Digital Ocean could employ reviewers and still nobody would be happy. There'd be comments about gatekeeping and rejections will be too subjective. Unfortunately, the majority is mostly silent, so I'll just say: Digital Ocean, good job on trying to make things better. Whatever your motives, you created a discussion about open-source promotion and hopefully some good will come out of it.
oxinabox 6y ago
More important is they changed the acceptance criteria to be Merged PRs. That is what it should have always been. Or at least "not closed" PRs.
sharkdp 6y ago
In the past years, I have actually experienced Hacktoberfest as a really great event - both as a contributor as well as a maintainer. The recent events sadden me, but I also understand why these changes were necessary. I just opted in to Hacktoberfest PRs for two of my projects: bat and fd. For bat, I opened three special issues for Hacktoberfest in order to help contributors who are completely new to the open source world: - https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1211 https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1211 - https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1213 https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1213 - https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1216 https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1216 Curious to see how this works out. The first PRs are already coming in :-)
scruffyherder 6y ago
So I’ll make my own repo and submit nonstop. Also this is why I have my own CVS with hookers and blackjack.

262 points by gmemstr 6y ago

I posted something similar in the other thread about this. This change probably kills Hacktoberfest imo. What maintainers would want to subject themselves to spam PRs by opting-in. Anyway, I feel like allowing PRs before this point to count as valid is a bad idea. I would guess that 70k people already submitted 4 spam PRs in their own repo by now following the tutorials that have been posted for this.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I have a Pebble smartwatch app[1] that only I have ever worked on (aside from one PR to change an icon). I don't really expect anyone else to contribute, but it would be neat. I just opted it in to Hacktoberfest. Best case scenario, I actually get a great PR because someone was looking for Hacktoberfest-eligible repos and thought my app looked cool. Worst-case scenario, I get a bunch of spam PRs that I reject—but since I basically never get any PRs, this doesn't seem like such a huge problem. [1]: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Pebble-RSS-Reader https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Pebble-RSS-Reader
- throwahtbfest 6y ago
  > Worst-case scenario, I get a bunch of spam PRs that I reject—but since I basically never get any PRs, this doesn't seem like such a huge problem. That's what I thought. Now I'm getting spammed with PRs containing personal insults. Take care.
- gerogerke 6y ago
  I suggest adding the hacktobefest label to issues you'd like to see tackled. Many people search for `label:hacktoberfest language:Rust is:open` or the likes to find projects to contribute to. I have not found a way to search for repos with a repo-tag yet.
  - account42 6y ago
    > I have not found a way to search for repos with a repo-tag yet. https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest
askmike 6y ago
> This change probably kills Hacktoberfest imo. I'd say the spam tactics executed on such a large scale killed Hacktoberfest. This is just damage control.
leonidasv 6y ago
Repos were being tagged as hacktoberfest-friendly by maintainers long before it was mandatory.
nonbirithm 6y ago
I personally wouldn't participate in Hacktoberfest after this. I'd never want to be seen wearing the t-shirt they'd give out after all the spam and drama. At this point wearing it would probably give the wrong impression to the people who are actually invested in OSS.

fortran77 6y ago

I'll create some repos that are nothing but /* comments */ and welcome any and all pull requests! This way everyone can be an FOSS contributor and win t-shirts and stickers.

amrrs 6y ago
If you had read Hacktoberfest's previous blog post on this matter. They even encouraged those spammers to create a repo on their own github account and create 4 PRs within those repos just to get qualified for the T-shirts but I think anyways the damage has been done and by providing T-shirts to those spammers they're not penalizing their behavior any ways.
- kjsthree 6y ago
  I imagine a sea of furrowed brows aimed at those showing up to conferences wearing a Hacktoberfest shirt.
- olodus 6y ago
  I don't really get why that is a bad thing. It is better that they do it there, on their own repos, than spam maintainers as it is right now. And you want people to learn how to make a repo and do PRs right? Let's have them practice on their own. Do you really need the t-shirt to be some mark of super-hackers?
  - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    It sounds like that just moves the spam from worthless PRs to worthless repos, which may even be more harmful in the long-run.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Worthless repos are fine. Microsoft can afford the storage costs and the long tail is already long and doesn't bother anyone.
6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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maple3142 6y ago

I think it is better to take a hybrid approach to this. Make newly created accounts can only contribute to #Hacktoberfest repos, and older account can still contribute to any repository while still being counted.

t0astbread 6y ago
I'm not sure about that. Almost every developer I know has a GitHub account so I assume most people including spammers finding out about Hacktoberfest would already have an account that qualifies.
- pininja 6y ago
  To draw out a hypothesis: existing accounts with real names and projects may value their reputation enough to not spam. Perhaps a reasonable line of thinking is spam accounts are newly created “anonymous” accounts. I haven’t looked, so I don’t know if there is any correlation. It’s an imperfect filter for spammers since of course anonymous accounts already exist.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    "Real" names are even easier to write than spam PRs. Sincerely, John Smith
kardos 6y ago
So what do you do to fend off the accounts created this year to get around this rule next year?

aloknnikhil 6y ago

> https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#quality https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#quality The quality standards are so low, I am honestly not surprised by the amount of spam this has generated. > Last but not least, one pull request to fix a typo is fine, but 5 pull requests to remove a stray whitespace is not. https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#spam https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#spam And to make matters worse, the onus falls on the maintainer to mark a PR as spam. This honestly feels like a DDoS attack on open-source rather than promoting open-source. I don't think there's any way to save this. EDIT: I think DigitalOcean completely missed the point on promoting open-source. It's not about the PRs. It's about everything that goes before you submit your first PR. Reading mailing lists. Actively participating in discussions with the maintainers. Reading the docs. It seems like they wanted an easy way out to promote their brand without putting in the effort to review the PRs and filtering out spam by raising the bar on what qualifies for a PR (i.e. not requiring all the leg-work for writing your first PR).

raverbashing 6y ago
Does GitHub allow an user to be marked as a spammer?
- google234123 6y ago
  All the users called on the r/programming thread about this were banned by github.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    What does "called" mean here? Called out for spamming?
- aloknnikhil 6y ago
  I think this is the closest thing you can do https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/blocking-a-user-from-your-personal-account https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-communit... https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/blocking-a-user-from-your-organization https://docs.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-communit... But that still means maintainers have to build an active list of blocked users. That's definitely not scalable.

deleted 6y ago

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tehlike 6y ago

This hacktoberfest reminds me of rats of hanoi incident, an example of a measure becoming a target. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902.amp https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...

makeupsomething 6y ago
Yes it reminded me of a similar story about snakes in India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

ryanar 6y ago

I applaud what D.O. has done in a very short time to try and fix this with the community. I do however think that this could also backfire. I entirely agree with the comment made on the PR by sylveon https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/596#issuecomment-702986348 https://github.com/digitalocean/hacktoberfest/pull/596#issue... I'm not a fan of this change because: - It significantly reduces the pool of repos that you can PR to. I've contributed to repos which haven't explicitly opted in to Hacktoberfest this year and in the past as well. Repos in which I am more comfortable contributing in than some random GitHub search result for the "hacktoberfest" tag. With this change, I am forced to look into those, or convince the maintainers to tag their repos. - For intermediate or experienced programmers it voids the whole event because the vast majority of OSS projects won't get involved. - After the spam fest that this year was, people aren't inclined to add the tag to their repos because it paints a target for spam over them. - Maintainers can now gatekeep your contributions, so even if it's something meaningful the maintainer can deny you a +1 PR for your work. It can be frustrating spending a non-insignificant amount of time to get the t-shirt the right way and then have that time nullified. - It doesn't address "hello world" spam repos. In fact, it encourages them because of the reduced amount of repos available to contribute to.

franciscop 6y ago
> With this change, I am forced to look into those, or convince the maintainers to tag their repos. That is a very false premise. You can help any open source project! That's the spirit of open source! It'll make things better for you and for others. Now, if you want that free t-shirt, sure there are rules. But no one is "forcing" you not to contribute to OSS. All of the points here seem based on this false premise.
- smbullet 6y ago
  > But no one is "forcing" you not to contribute to OSS. The GP is talking about Hacktoberfest... Not sure how you got the impression that they are talking about OSS in general.
  - 6y ago

janee 6y ago

I would even take it a step further and allow maintainers the ability to cherry pick certain issues they'd like to put up for hacktober. I'd still keep the repo wide tag for opt-in, but also optionally provide issue level opt-in. Alternatively, you can provide a platform where participants can self regulate...e.g. like spammers called out on r/programming or maybe a spam detection algo. Edit: maybe the incentives can also be altered. E.g. sticker for non opt-in repos, t-shirt for opt-in ones. Hmm solving bad actor behaviour is an interesting problem

bbrazil 6y ago
> I would even take it a step further and allow maintainers the ability to cherry pick certain issues they'd like to put up for hacktober. At least for Prometheus the ones we tagged with hacktoberfest are ones we'd expect a new developer to have a good chance to be able to complete. I don't think we should be disincentive people who attempt to instead tackle more thorny issues.

domenicd 6y ago

I'm cautiously optimistic about this. This is what Hacktoberfest should have been from the start. A company incentivizing pull requests against your repo should require your consent. A maintainer needs to affirmatively sign up for this sort of work; they can't have it thrust upon them. As a maintainer, all the other half-measures people have suggested (e.g., accepted PRs only; account age measurements; filtering out README changes) do not actually reduce the unasked-for burden on me. That said, I'm not sure this year can be salvaged. It's not clear whether all the existing spammers will get the message. I hope DigitalOcean emails all folks signed up to notify them of this change. (They haven't communicated any of their changes so far in such a way.) Notably, a day ago, the DigitalOcean staff thought this wouldn't make a difference. [1] And it's even possible this will just result in issue spam begging maintainers to add the Hacktoberfest topic. But it's also possible that this will work out. The best version of this is that low-quality contributors looking for a t-shirt get directed toward honeypot repositories, and folks interested in making substantial contributions will continue using issue labels like GitHub's own "good first issue", or the Hacktoberfest repository topic, to find places to contribute. We'll see in a day or two whether this is enough. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24648285

MrStonedOne 6y ago
> A company incentivizing pull requests against your repo should require your consent. Why?
- dannyr 6y ago
  Do you really have to ask "why"?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I do. It sounds really weird to me. The whole concept of pull requests is that anyone can make them.
    - dannyr 6y ago

kardos 6y ago

Switching to opt-in is the right call here to limit any further damage. Meanwhile, it's painfully obvious that the whole thing is aimed to be a "low-touch" / "fully automated" campaign where the participation rules are designed around that goal. Makes sense -- it's easy to scale, etc. However now it's clear that the outcome is the polar opposite of GSoC, where participating in GSoC has prestige and produces high quality oss contributions, and it's facing an unwinnable battle against an internet army looking for the minimum effort end-run around the rules to extract a tshirt... So, my take is that DO should take a longer view and try to raise the profile of Hacktoberfest by making it more exclusive -- eg take a step toward GSoC. For ex, there are a handful of oss-bounty sites (bountysource, issuehunt, etc) where people post bounties for things they want implemented. Could DO partner here in some fashion? Such as matching bounties in a certain range ($10<x<$50?) with a tshirt? Or matching bounties? Make it a year-round promo instead of one month?

dmurray 6y ago
The cognitive dissonance here is that DO want to give the low-quality contributors a t-shirt. These are Indian students with good hustle and poor technical skills who market themselves as technologists. They're going to be managers making purchasing decisions at tech companies in a few years time, and they lack the technical sophistication to choose between DO and competitors on axes other than "I've heard of them"/"they have a good reputation"/"they gave me a t-shirt once". These customers are both more valuable and a thousand times more numerous than the ones capable of earning even a $10 bug bounty. I'm generalising here, but hopefully not racially stereotyping too much.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  So in your mind, hacktoberfest's marketing strategy isn't "let's sponsor a big public pro open source event so we get lots of good rep especially among open source enthusiasts and potential hires"... But instead it's some weird ass 5 year long-play betting that random indian students will, in the future, have purchasing power to choose Digital Ocean because they got a free shirt half a decade prior. "Generalising" isn't the word I would use.

TheRealPomax 6y ago

Excellent. Reading the PR notes on how it'll now work, this sounds imminently sensible: - projects can opt in by adding a keyword to their project description on github for a month. That's barely any effort for projects that care, and - PRs that are merged won't count unless the project maintainers welcome hacktober contributions and are willing to add a label that marks a PR as "this one counts". And if "not getting a $20 T-shirt for free" is the only thing making a difference between you contributing a meaningful PR to a project, and not contributing a PR at all, then let's face it: the open source world really isn't worse off.

sofixa 6y ago
Isn't it worst off? It's a meaningful contribution worse off. Do you take the same stance with people who are paid to make OSS contributions?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Those people are paid for in-demand fixes, not for pushing their PRs on people.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  A project not getting a PR that it would otherwise also not have gotten is nothing lost.

JustARandomGuy 6y ago

Glad I completed my Hacktoberfest requirements earlier; a little bummed that the shirt will invariably = low quality contributors. A better way to do this IMO would be to kick off a year long contest; for example: you sign up, every week you need to average +7 lines of code on your own repo. Bonus points if the repo actually does something useful. After a year of that, you get a Tshirt. Weeds out the lazy, encourages people to actually build something.

Aeolun 6y ago
This would encourage me to automate adding 7 lines every month. Not sure if that would be in line with the goal :)

throwahtbfest 6y ago

I created an issue on one of my repos. It's a really simple set of scripts that manipulate some muni data. I asked for an update from stale data sources/scripts to more recent stuff. Exactly the sort of thing that's great for a first-time contributor -- zero dependencies, small code base, well-scoped issue. I could do it myself in ~10 minutes of work, but figured it'd be a nice chance for someone else to get a first experience working with GH and maybe get a free shirt. I got one PR that did exactly what I asked. Great, merged! Good experience all around -- exactly what I expected! Then I marked a PR "invalid" because they made changes to a README that weren't helpful (in fact, actively misleading!). Clearly low-effort PR spam. BTW, the same low-effort PR spam I'm also getting on a bunch of other repos where I didn't solicit help. And now, because I marked unsolicited incorrect changes to a README file as "invalid", I'm getting new pull requests calling me an asshole. So... that's my experience with Hacktoberfest. I guess it's my fault for assuming the outcome would be anything else in the month after the Eternal September. Especially with free t-shirts on the line.

dayjobpork 6y ago

As a full time software documentation writer, all I ever do on github is correct docs and text (because nothing looks more unprofessional than terrible spelling, especially in your UI, expect maybe for when the directions are wrong and don't work) I've just checked and am now running at over 40 rejected changes, many with really offensive comments added to them. Open source developers often come across as very rude and argumentative and this sort of response to legitimate fixes kills any interest I had in helping. Looking through some of the projects I they are also treating code changes the same way. I'd suggest that that future hacktoberfests will have much less participation

bgdam 6y ago
As someone who can't be bothered to fix such stuff in documentation, I would like to wholeheartedly thank you for doing this. Please do not get discouraged by the fallout from the Hacktoberfest mess, people everywhere seem to be short on patience right now. I'd suggest taking a break, and maybe start giving PRs next month :)
lichtenberger 6y ago
If you encounter spelling errors or grammatical issues, please help fixing on https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix and https://sirix.io https://sirix.io :-) I'm no native english speaker, so I'd be very happy if people fix stuff.
temikus 6y ago
As an OSS maintainer I’m _very_ happy when people correct my spelling/formatting and make the docs look better. Please don’t let a couple of twats ruin your motivation. What you’re doing is really good for the community!

wa11f10wer 6y ago

I'm a participant with 2 PRs merged so far. I totally support the opt-in mode, but at the same time discouraged from continuing further (contributing to repos with the hacktoberfest topic, not open source in general). 1. I think the opt-in should have been there at the start. Repo maintainers should have been informed, and given ample time to decide if they want to participate or not, so that participants are likely to have a wider range of repos to choose from. From the organiser's POV, it will help them to measure the impact of this event on open source events. However, this doesn't seem to be planned at the start (didn't happen in the past years either?) The explanation I can think of is that either they didn't have a nice talk with GitHub to get their support, or like many ppl have said, it's more of a publicity stunt. 2. It could have been done with better communication. If not for this HN thread, I wouldn't have known the change in rules. No email sent. Even the official website still has rule sections that say any public repo will work. 3. I'm discouraged to participate further. I do love the t-shirt. I'd be lying to say that I wasn't motivated by the shirt from the start. I also wanted to beat the crowd by making PRs early by sacrificing my time for other hobbies/work. However, I made PRs that are welcomed and the maintainers were happy to merge. But now I feel the shirt will only bring me the suspicion and disgrace of potentially being a spammer. 4. I don't have many choices of repo to contribute now. In the hacktoberfest topic, there's 0 repo in my preferred language. The first repo I see with the highest number of stars is some algo repo. The 2 repos I've contributed and likely to contribute again are not qualifies anymore. There are still good things from my experience. I have made PRs before, but I'm not actively contributing. I'd rather spend my free time on other hobbies. But now, I do see that I can find joy in open source. I'm likely to contribute to repos that interest me again in the future.

bblough 6y ago
You're not alone. I understand why this change is needed - jerks often ruin things. But I hope that DO will refine the approach a bit, as opt-in-only will probably kill Hacktoberfest for me. The intersection of projects that I use or care about, the projects that are in a language that I'm interested in using (or even learning), the projects that are on github, and the projects that will actually opt in even after the events of the last few days, well... I'm guessing that set is going to be pretty small. Quite frankly I don't want to spend more time searching/scrolling through github trying to find contributions to make than I do actually contributing. Of course, none of that probably matters, as I realize I'm not the target audience for Hacktoberfest: I regularly contribute to open source projects. Whether or not I get a t-shirt won't change that, but I'm not going to lie - I've enjoyed getting the shirts (and stickers!), and wear them often. They can be good conversation starters, and it's also nice to have a tangible reminder of my contributions, since so much of what we do in this field is completely intangible. Though, to your point, the potential implications of the t-shirts going forward may change my feelings on wearing them. And I completely agree w/r/t to communication. Earlier today I made a PR and refreshed my Hacktoberfest profile to make sure it picked it up, only to see it marked as not valid due to not being in an approved repository. So I went looking for an explanation and eventually wound up in this thread. As you noted, there was no mention of it on the site, no email, etc. There also doesn't appear to be a contact email listed anywhere on the Hacktoberfest site.

franga2000 6y ago

For the past few years, I've made this tradition of working a bit harder in September so I can have more free time in October and make all the contributions I've been meaning to make. I never made the PRs specifically to get the shirt, they were things I wanted to do at some point and the shirt was a good incentive to actually get them done. Just like past years, I have a similar todo list with 10-or-so items this year and started working on it yesterday. All of the contributions I have planned have had open issues for a while and I've discussed them with the maintainers for sometimes months. Now none of them will count towards the shirt. And I want that god damn shirt! I know it's stupid, but it was really nice to get something sorta-exclusive for doing something good for the open-source community, even if my contributions weren't particularly groundbreaking. I'd gladly pay shipping costs if necessary (actually, I think that would be a good anti-spam measure). But now I'll have to spend more time looking for tagged projects to contribute to and probably end up not finishing some of my planned PRs.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
A sincere "thank you" from a good person such as an open source project maintainer means so much more to me than a consumerist t-shirt. Your comment reminded me of a 1-word PR I sent that fixed a bug in a project, and it gives me a glow in my stomach thinking about now, months later. You can go on cafe press and by yourself any t-shirt you want.

INTPenis 6y ago

I only heard of hacktoberfest this year and as soon as I saw the website my first thought was "this is going to be abused". I'm honestly surprised they didn't see it. Github has become like a social media of programming. Even before I heard of hacktoberfest I had noticed people building hollow or shallow profiles on github to attract employers. Most recruiters won't go deeper than your profile, so they'll see a bunch of contributions but those might just be Issues created, PRs rejected or documentation adjustments.

greatgib 6y ago

Good change! With a more limited base of oss projects that opt-in, at least it can give them publicity in exchange for accepting the possible burden of bad new / single-shot contributors

wildpeaks 6y ago

If you want to opt-in but worry about spam, one compromise can be to temporarily limit interactions to previous contributors only: this way, it rewards people who help the rest of the year.

gregoriol 6y ago

This seems like a quickfix idea and doesn't provide a good incentive for open-source projects: in that configuration, it requires additional knowledge (of the rules) and work (tags, ...) from repository maintainers, just so some people can get a tshirt, not sure it's worth it. They should have acknowledged their failure and cancelled the game altogether.

josteink 6y ago
> just so some people can get a tshirt, not sure it's worth it. That’s looking at things a wee bit one-dimensional isn’t it? Until this year Hacktoberfest has been a fun event where people of all levels of skill has learned how one can help out in open-source projects. They have learned how to fork, make changes and propose that those changes get upstreamed. You may take these skills for granted, but they first needs to be learnt. They have learnt what sort of reception to expect based on how they have presented their changes to the upstream repo and/or maintainers and how to adjust it based on a feedback and consensus. You may take this experience for granted, but it needs to come from somewhere. In both these respects Hacktoberfest has helped. Looking at entire Hacktoberfest and what it has done over all its years as simply a t-shirt because some Indian spammers tried to game the system for that single price this single year is absolutely not fair. > They should have acknowledged their failure and cancelled the game altogether. You should acknowledge that such confrontational attitude and vitriol won’t do the discussion any good. You could come up with all kinds of constructive criticism here instead, but that might take some effort on your part. It will get you a more fruitful discussion though. Disclaimer: Maintainer for various projects and Hacktoberfest attendee.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

I love that this whole situation is analogous do the dimishing status-signaling-value of a college degree due to grade inflation and admissions scams, but it's about diminishing the status value of a t-shirt.

pietromenna 6y ago

I think for next edition: - Maintainers should create a month ahead opt-in and list some good issues for hacktoberfest. This means, we agree to help you start on OSS and have something which is meaninful for us listed. - A browsable list of projects which opted in. So you can look for projects to contribute. - It will look something more like GSoC. - What I think it would be great is if maintainers are willing to mentor newcomers so they are able to help more in the future, not only on a given october timeframe.

LockAndLol 6y ago

No matter what happens, there'll be a vocal minority complaining about this too. Digital Ocean could employ reviewers and still nobody would be happy. There'd be comments about gatekeeping and rejections will be too subjective. Unfortunately, the majority is mostly silent, so I'll just say: Digital Ocean, good job on trying to make things better. Whatever your motives, you created a discussion about open-source promotion and hopefully some good will come out of it.

oxinabox 6y ago

More important is they changed the acceptance criteria to be Merged PRs. That is what it should have always been. Or at least "not closed" PRs.

sharkdp 6y ago

In the past years, I have actually experienced Hacktoberfest as a really great event - both as a contributor as well as a maintainer. The recent events sadden me, but I also understand why these changes were necessary. I just opted in to Hacktoberfest PRs for two of my projects: bat and fd. For bat, I opened three special issues for Hacktoberfest in order to help contributors who are completely new to the open source world: - https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1211 https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1211 - https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1213 https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1213 - https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1216 https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1216 Curious to see how this works out. The first PRs are already coming in :-)

scruffyherder 6y ago

So I’ll make my own repo and submit nonstop. Also this is why I have my own CVS with hookers and blackjack.