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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

171–180 of 511 posts

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this because I've seen people bash Indians for ruining sites like Quora and Medium with lot of bad quality content. Spam job offers, freelancing sites with bloated profiles, sending unsolicited messages and resume to people in LinkedIn and AngelList. Much of this comes from us having 1/6 of world's population, but that doesn't excuse a big group from their misdeeds. I personally believe that there's a nee…

I'm almost afraid to ask this, so please assume good intent and bear with me - I promise this is a genuine question :) Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on en…

> Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.

I have been told something to this effect. That some families, for example, are "business oriented" and raise their children to view everything as negotiable and for the taking. While other families may be focused on engineering or something else. It fits with strong parental involvement there, and the expectation that the children must support the prior generation. Easiest to push children in a direction you know. Basically multi-generational career goals.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#172
post #62

I received two pull requests for two projects on GitHub last night. I am the author of one and the maintainer of the other. At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the…

I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the README. Now it makes sense.

I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#174
"There's almost no limits, so if your request is merged into any Open Source repository, you qualify. Amazing." Well, not all open source software is using git, and even some that is, doesn't use GitHub. Also, how do they see if you qualify, really? (Do you need a GitHub account? The linked document doesn't seem to say that, or if it does, it isn't very clear.) (Anyways, I wouldn't want to submit a pull request merely for the purpose of the shirt. I would ignore that when making such a thing. If I get a shirt too (and I do not already have enough shirts, although I think I do have enough shirts), then that is a bonus, I suppose.) (I do not use git myself. I think I have never received any patches to my software, except maybe one, but I do not really remember if it is or not. I have, however, merged in other people's changes when I found them, although these aren't requests. Actually, other people have sometimes merged in some of my changes too despite not being a pull request, too. How will that ever count?) Hopefully, it can be explained better.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#175
post #155
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of its existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever di…

Why do you think hundreds of maintainers have to clean up their repos? What is your acceptable ratio of misuse to value add?

To be honest, we are well beyond hundreds of maintainers that will need to clean up their repos. I've been crawling the "Improve Docs" spam issues since they started appearing.

As far as I'm aware, there are already 4500+ repos which have had a low quality, single-line-change, "Improve Docs" PR opened in the past two days.

Just to pull out a few repos out for example purposes:

* 7 spam - https://github.com/seductivegeese/softi.es

* 8 spam - https://github.com/easydepot/websiteSwallower/pulls

* 8 spam - https://github.com/tokio-rs/website

* 13 spam - https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website

* 15+ spam - https://github.com/pyvec/elsa

* 15+ spam - https://github.com/justicedemocrats/candidate-website

* 15+ spam - https://github.com/Salamek/blacklist

* 20+ spam - https://github.com/openmaptiles/www.openmaptiles.org

* 25+ spam - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitzjs.com

* 60+ spam - https://github.com/EdmontonPy/edmontonpy

Heck, take look at the PRs and commit history of https://github.com/azmat21/UyghurWebsiteCrawler. It's been two days into October, and this repo has gotten 55 PRs. It hasn't ever gotten a single PR before this as far as I can tell.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#176
post #155
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of its existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever di…

Why do you think hundreds of maintainers have to clean up their repos? What is your acceptable ratio of misuse to value add?

So it was a net positive thing, and the suffering of some maintainers are acceptable, just so DigitalOcean can slap its name and claim it helps opensource? Just donate money or something man. Jesus fucking christ.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#178
post #25

I have a couple of vaguely popular repos on github (~100,000 downloads a month) Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook. If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold. (In the large sche…

One of the PR I made for hacktoberfest was fixing typo in a command in a doc. In the current case however, it seems people are not even trying to do something trivially useful.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#179
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think hundreds of maintainers have to clean up their repos? What is your acceptable ratio of misuse to value add?

To be honest, we are well beyond hundreds of maintainers that will need to clean up their repos. I've been crawling the "Improve Docs" spam issues since they started appearing. As far as I'm aware, there are already 4500+ repos which have had a low quality, single-line-change, "Improve Docs" PR opened in the past two days. Just to pull out a few repos out for example purposes: * 7 spam - https://github.com/seductiveg…

Not to be pedantic but I think there is some conflation here between PR/repo and maintainer? How do you define "low quality" hacktoberfest was originally also focused on people learning to code who could help clean up docs/fix typos etc.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#180
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

What’s this bitboxx? Somebody decided the spam PRs weren’t enough spam so they created a bot to amplify it?
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