One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#161

Post by thorwarasdasd » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

asicsp wrote: post #110

random_visitor wrote: post #57

Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't. This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I requ…

> I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. Hey, I'd like to help if possible. I'd probably not have the time to mentor, but I can help with learning resources. All my books are free to read online ( https://github.com/learnbyexample/s…

This is exactly the kind of spam we’re talking about. And I saw the repositories.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#162

Post by d3nj4l » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

xrisk wrote: post #97

d3nj4l wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a systemic problem, and the fact that you’ve somehow “risen above it” is not a reason to virtue signal. (As an Indian) As much as I agree with you, I feel like this is different. I'm worried spam on this scale will damage the reputation of Indian OSS contributors.

Blame DigitalOcean for not making this opt-in. Blame a bad implementation. Blame anything. But are you seriously gonna blame people looking for free swag? How many of us haven’t done something for swag before?

I completely agree with you, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who shoulders the blame if OSS maintainers start to get wary of README/docs PRs from github users with Indian-sounding names.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#163

Post by tomc1985 » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:10 AM UTC

random_visitor wrote: post #57

Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't. This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I requ…

> CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him

I say, cancel him. And all his fans. CC's think they're hot shit because they can produce a video and upload it to youtube, forgetting entirely that it is the content of the video that gives it any worth. We hate on moronic Medium posts idiotic PR releases, and other low-effort media, why should this be any different? If he deputizes his audience to be assholes he should pay for it.

Stop letting ignorance be an excuse with these folks.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#164

Post by encom » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

If CloudFlare thinks you're a bot, like me: https://archive.ph/0F5nz

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#165

Post by neom » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:13 AM UTC

quadrifoliate wrote: post #42

neom wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did a…

> You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it…

Well I haven't worked for DigitalOcean in many many years. My reply was to calling hacktoberfest "shit". I do agree given the scale the initiative has reached, projects should reach out to DO, get on a list and be the "approved" project. As a point of interest on your "but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with" - how would you have designed it?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#166

Post by SahAssar » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

emidoots wrote: post #143

SPBS wrote: post #63

https://mobile.twitter.com/avestura/status/13117539940716666... This guy is just straight up begging for a PR merge so that he can get his free T shirt -- I'd wager a good portion of these PR submitters have no idea what they're getting into, they just think they can get a free shirt if they do this according to what the youtube video said.

Most of them will because Hacktoberfest relies on project maintainers to flag the PR as `invalid` within a certain window and close it, AFAIK. Though I imagine with all the outrage over this that will definitely be changing.

Wow, that's weird. IIRC the first year the PRs had to be merged for them to count.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#167

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:18 AM UTC

I've made an amazing project for people who need to make amazing pull requests, they can do it here

https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject

Now I guess I will have to make some sort of solution that autorejects anything that doesn't have the word amazing (or some synonym for amazing, I'm not a tyrant)

on edit: hmm, there's a typo in the Readme, a good start.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#168

Post by Zeturic » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #118

chillee wrote: post #40

I agree that the spam is problematic, but I feel the need to call out his "data collection". As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says > A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues. and > A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues. ??? Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day…

Love this one — somebody is trying to rename "package.json" into "package": https://github.com/dinosaurjs/website/pull/28

My favorite one I saw renamed "README.md" to "My Reading".

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#169

Post by shanecp » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:20 AM UTC

Because everything goes through Github, can't they add a simple spam detector?

Let's say if the the user doesn't have many PRs in profile, and sending a lot of them within 24 hours.

Sounds like it will be a lot easier for github bot to flag these.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#170

Post by bad_user » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

Zeturic wrote: post #168

bad_user wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love this one — somebody is trying to rename "package.json" into "package": https://github.com/dinosaurjs/website/pull/28

My favorite one I saw renamed "README.md" to "My Reading".

Link, please :)