Thew

Posted on Oct 1, 2020

DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source

#hacktoberfest #opensource #github #discuss

There is a rising spam issue with hacktoberfest this year.

Domenic Denicola

@domenic

Ugh, oh no, October is starting. Prepare for a month of spam pull requests... whatwg/html has already been hit hard, at 5 in the last 3 hours.

@hacktoberfest, please please stop this annual tradition of wasting maintainers' time. You are a net negative for the world.

17:22 PM - 30 Sep 2020

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.

Matt Cowley 👉👈

@mattipv4

Today was not a good day. Who knew folks would create such ridiculous spam in search of a free t-shirt. Noise is being made internally about it, but there is only so much I can personally do. As an open-source maintainer myself I hate seeing the mess Hf is causing. I'm sorry.

21:42 PM - 30 Sep 2020

UPDATE:

Here are official responses

Top comments (22)

Irkan Hadi • Oct 1 '20 • Edited

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...

Sundeep • Oct 1 '20

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:

Gosh, you mean, your team would have to deal with what ALL OF US ARE NOW DEALING WITH??

You're currently forcing that massive moderation pile on OpenSource maintainers instead of the people who created it, DigitalOcean. It's like Eternal September of Github.

Ugh, oh no, October is starting. Prepare for a month of spam pull requests... whatwg/html has already been hit hard, at 5 in the last 3 hours.

We're getting hit over at github.com/openstreetmap/openstree... and I've seen more at github.com/phpmyadmin/website . Marking as spam is futile - they only need 4 spam PRs ignored for a week and they get a free t-shirt - if that takes 16 junk PRs and 12 annoyed maintainers, you'll still reward them.

Stephan B. R. Langenau • Oct 1 '20

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.

ender minyard • Oct 1 '20 • Edited

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 • Oct 2 '20 • Edited

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 • Oct 2 '20

Are beginners capable of resolving existing issues?

Valts Liepiņš • Oct 2 '20

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.

Cody Skinner • Oct 1 '20

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.

Sundeep • Oct 1 '20

Yep, I've got only spam PRs instead of anything useful for past two years. So, I archived my repo two days back.

Cody Skinner • Oct 1 '20

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.

Thew • Oct 2 '20 • Edited

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 • Oct 2 '20 • Edited

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 • Oct 2 '20

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.