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
Oldest comments (22)
Yep, I've got only spam PRs instead of anything useful for past two years. So, I archived my repo two days back.
I kind of agree, but you can fight back, you have the option to mark PRs as spam or not productive and it won't be counted for them. Hopefully, this will discourage low-quality PRs.
I just saw someone's boasting about finishing the "challenge" and his 4 PRs is just adding his name to a list. so I am reporting all those repos in hacktoberfest website, and I hope you do too. If we all do that, next years might be better.
Update: it seems that Digital Ocean responded to the spam issue: hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hac...
In my opinion, it should be opt-in. Marking as spam can help, but that is not enough.
See this twitter response from DO: twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/131139... - they have only one person for Hf social, support & spam repo reports
And look what everybody else is facing:
It's a little buried under the resources page on their site, but there is the option to report entire repositories as spam on the Hf site: hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/report. This can at least combat the spammy "Add your name to a list" repos.
I really hate to hear this. I've always been a fan of Hacktoberfest, but it's really sad to see it just leading to a mass of spam PRs.
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.
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.
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.
Are beginners capable of resolving existing issues?
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.
God! People are literally begging to accept a PR! This is very frustrating and a total time waste which nonetheless make things messy. 😢
Interesting Announcement from Hacktoberfest:
hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hac...
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.
Digital Ocean posted a response here
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