DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source

There is a rising spam issue with hacktoberfest this year.

Which later results in the blog post "DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source"

There is also a discussion on Hacker News

Honestly, I enjoyed Hacktoberfest for many years but this problem is really hurting open source community. I hope DigitalOcean will take this seriously. Fortunately, DigitalOcean Community Platform Manager is looking into this.

UPDATE:

Here are official responses

• from DigitalOcean
• from The Dev Team

Comments

[Arturs Smirnovs]

New update from GitHub: twitter.com/github/status/13117727...

Temporary disable pull requests :)

[Thew]

I think the spam is encouraged by this video (privated). It tells people to add "amazing" to every project.

You can watch it in this summary.

[leob]

Playing the devil's advocate, but isn't Hacktoberfest sort of encouraging this? I remember I read an intro to Hacktoberfest (don't know if it was on dev.to or on the DO site) last year, where it was stated something like this:

"Daunting? No a PR can be VERY simple! It can just be ... (some extremely simple and trivial 'contribution...')" ......... kind of encouraging people to issue these trivial PR's :-)

If you really wanna contribute in a deep and meaningful way then it's probably not possible to craft 4 great and helpful PR's in your spare time within 4 weeks, just to score your hipster t-shirt ... I can imagine that maintainers aren't eagerly waiting for an avalanche of these low quality trivial PR's. Long-term and deep commitment is what they need!

[Valts Liepiņš]

I agree, they should reduce trivial contribution encouragements, but focus on teaching how to spot and resolve simple issues.

From my experience, it's very possible to create 4 meaningful contributions within a month. Either by choosing a familiar project, or small enough project that is easy to set up and test. It all boils down to choosing the right projects to contribute to and issues to resolve.

[Arturs Smirnovs]

Yeah, i wanted to participate in this year hacktoberfest but i knew that i didn't want to spam hell out of stupid PR..

I made already 4 mine, and they all are proper features.. Respect others!

[Corey McCarty]

Digital Ocean posted a response here

[Sunil Chaudhary]

This is my first HF & today itself I saw many spam & very unrelevent issues(like revamp complete website, etc) & pull requests on the many of repo's.

[Bhuvanesh Hingal]

God! People are literally begging to accept a PR! This is very frustrating and a total time waste which nonetheless make things messy. 😢

[Bhuvanesh Hingal]

Interesting Announcement from Hacktoberfest:

hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hac...

[ender minyard]

Genuine question: How can beginners help maintainers?

I made a repo specifically for Hacktoberfest and the most basic issues were completed poorly or not at all. Someone tried to get a pull request by adding spaces to the README, then adding a reaction gif once I caught on.

I removed beginner-friendly from my repo tags and no longer tag the issues with Hacktoberfest.

I don't think Hacktoberfest shouldn't exist, but I'm trying to find out if it helps anyone besides the people getting a free T-shirt.

[Valts Liepiņš]

It would be interesting to find out some useful/spam ratio.

Personally, in the last two Hacktoberfest events I focused on resolving existing issues in projects, instead of doing cosmetic fixes. Perhaps it should be a requirement for the PRs to solve actual issues.

[ender minyard]

Are beginners capable of resolving existing issues?

[Valts Liepiņš]

The event is not beginners exclusive, although one of it's goals is to introduce new coders to collaboration on open source projects.

I think it's possible to find such issues, which matches the person's skill level, despite being new to coding. Or even if the person can not code yet, often projects have issues for either writing documentation or expanding translations.

I remain optimistic and believe that with appropriate briefing, even beginners can contribute meaningful content.

[Stephan B. R. Langenau]

I think there should be an opt-in Option for this. When you want that someone contribute code to your repro you can opt-in. I think this would be the best solutions.

Of course I understand that some repro maintainer getting angry because of Spam Pull Requests. But you can also mark them as Spam and they will not count.