Hacktoberfest
If you aren't familar, Hacktoberfest is an annual event that occurs every October. It is held by Digital Ocean and encourages developers to submit Pull Requests to Open Source repositories and as a reward you get a T-Shirt.
There's almost no limits, so if your request is merged into any Open Source repository, you qualify. Amazing.
The Fallout
Twitter starts going nuts. Not soon after October begins, we see many popular open source maintainers taking to Twitter complaining about low quality PRs bordering on SPAM.
Yes! my inbox is full of ridiculous PRs with #hacktoberfest. Some are literally just adding dashes to a readme, etc. twitter.com/florinpop1705/…19:33 PM - 01 Oct 2020Florin Pop 👨🏻💻 @florinpop1705Please STOP spamming #hacktoberfest just to win a T-shirt! 👎 https://t.co/nPuu6GJE7L
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#shitoberfest@shitoberfest
Hi, I'm @shitoberfest. Do you maintain an opensource project?
Send a screenshot of bullshit drive by pull-requests caused by #hacktoberfest and tag @shitoberfest for curation and amplification.12:36 PM - 01 Oct 2020
Some more honest than others
Iván López@ilopmar@shitoberfest This is the best one of the +50 that we've received just today. At least they are honest about why they send the PR... 🤦♂️22:26 PM - 01 Oct 2020
Jonathan Reinink@reininkWelp, this is kind of annoying. Looks like I'm getting hit with the @digitalocean Hacktoberfest spam. 😕10:47 AM - 01 Oct 2020
Even a Covid19Tracking Repo is under attack
#shitoberfest@shitoberfestFight covid or deal with @shitoberfest. twitter.com/thatkevee/stat…18:15 PM - 01 Oct 2020Kevin Miller @thatkevee@shitoberfest We're busy tracking COVID in the US... and apparently closing spam PRs too. https://t.co/MU4BUpzDqE
A whole new Twitter account @shitoberfest was created to track this
The Cause
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.
To avoid linking to his YouTube and giving him views, I'll link to this Twitter of the action moment:
This YouTuber with 672K subscribers is encouraging his viewers to spam repos with LOW QUALITY PRs for #hacktoberfest
That's a 👎 from me
youtube.com/watch?v=v9902n…21:00 PM - 01 Oct 2020
The Response
The response from CodeWithHarry was weak at best. It offered no apology and instead links to many instances where he avoids responsibility by linking to areas in the video where he encourages quality PRs.
A humble request to everyone to not open spam pull requests on GitHub repositories!
Some people think that I am hurting the open source community.
The purpose of this video was to encourage participation in the events encouraging open source participation and to teach people what a pull request is and how a pull request works!
People understanding Hindi can watch the video but for people who are non Hindi speakers and for some reason think that I am requesting people to open spam pull requests, all I have told throughout the video is to make legit contributions to the open source.
I have said nowhere in the video to open spam pull requests.
I have made it clear in the video several times (for instance in the video at 00:55 - that you have to earn it by making contributions that count, 07:51 - Make legit contributions, 10:58, 11:10, etc).
Also at 05:33 - I avoided an actively maintained project and instead opened pull request on a project which was not being maintained just to demonstrate how contributing to an open source repository actually works.
I have not encouraged spam pull requests in bulk!
I also agree with the fact that events like hacktoberfest can be made better by making only the legit merged pull requests count. But that has been a topic of debate since years when hacktoberfest was launched.
I would also like to mention that many people opened their GitHub account, learned to make pull requests and made some amazing legit contributions to the open source too! I am proud of them and would like the entire developer community to act in a responsible manner.Thanks,
Harry 🙏
But this pinned comment is the least amount of effort he could have done to slow this shit storm.
How Do You Know CodeWithHarry Was Really The Cause?
Here's a screenshot of some pull requests from the repo micromtn.
Every request looks something like this:
This looks remarkably similar to the PR that was demonstrated in the video.
A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues.
A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues.
CodeWithHarry
CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him personally. After all, we're all human. With a following that big, he's definitely helped a lot of people. But he made a mistake here and he's going to have to be responsible for the outcome, which so far isn't looking great.
At the moment of this writing, his GitHub is 404. Was it taken down? Made private? Renamed?
It's only day 1.
Digital Ocean
Even Digital Ocean has chimed in on this fiasco.
We’ve traced the majority of this year’s spammy contributions back to a participant with a large online audience who openly encouraged their community to take part in spammy activities, including ideas on how to game the system.
Wait and See
So Lots of drama today. I guess all we can do is wait and see.
Hello HN 👋
This article hit #1 on HN. Go read the comments there for more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052
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Cheers 🍻
Update
Response from GitHub:
GitHub@githubNeed to take a break, or limit which people can send a pull request to your repo?
You can now limit interactions for a period of time. Find it in your project settings › moderation settings › interaction limits.20:59 PM - 01 Oct 2020
Response from Digital Ocean:
Hacktoberfest@hacktoberfestUPDATE: We’re making Hacktoberfest opt-in only for projects – which maintainers can do simply by adding the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to a repository! Thanks for your patience as we work on continually improving the Hacktoberfest experience. 💙🎉 twitter.com/digitalocean/s…02:41 AM - 03 Oct 2020DigitalOcean @digitaloceanWe heard you & made the biggest update yet. @Hacktoberfest 2020 is officially opt-in only for projects & maintainers! 💙 We’re excited to introduce these new measures to increase quality contributions & can’t wait to see what you build. https://t.co/kN7QV0Qb2N https://t.co/O4wcY3L5ak
Top comments (18)
Thanks for writing this. People need to understand that if you are into open-source contributions, then do it throughout the year or whenever is the need. Hacktoberfest should not be the ONLY reason to make PRs or raise issues. Sad thing is, people will still spam or make bad PRs just to get the tee or stickers. I mean how many times will you do this and show yourself as a cool open-source contributor?
I will soon be writing an article this week (releasing this Friday) on a similar topic. I hope it will help people understand more.
Post your article here when you are done, I'd love to read it! Cheers 🍻
Hi Joel, I just published it:
Hacktoberfest - through a different lens. 🌳
Vaibhav Khulbe ・ Oct 9 ・ 8 min read
Will read now 👍
I'm hopeful with Digital Ocean's new opt-in approach, open source maintainers won't be in hiding now. I feel like this whole drama has made Hacktoberfest better!
Hard to believe people are that hard up for a simple T-shirt. I guess the shirt may convey some programming prowess, but still...
(or maybe these are people from AWS and Google Cloud, trying to bankrupt upstart cloud vendor (and DEV sponsor) Digital Ocean - LOL. It's 2020 on the Internet - who knows?)
Opt-in was an obvious (and good) solution. Good they did that.
It probably took this event to make Hacktoberfest better. So in the end... it was a good thing?
Yeah, though I find it strange this wasn't the case in the previous Hacktoberfest. I guess everyone wants a T-shirt in these hard times.
It was a problem in previous Hacktoberfests though it was amplified because of this video.
Ooof
Ooof indeed
Relevant
This isn't a new problem and it was almost certainly not caused by one single youtuber with a few thousand active subscribers at most. The blame for this is on Digital Ocean, not on some dude on the internet.
It was a problem in previous Hacktoberfests though it was amplified because of this video.
🤣
Hacktoberfest was and is a mistake
It's improving 😁