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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

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Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#31

Post by karlshea »

MattGaiser wrote: post #13
jdminhbg wrote: post #3

What I don’t get is... why do this for a t-shirt? Am I missing something?

A lot of newer developers do it for resume reasons. I know people who have gone around doing spelling fixes to claim they contributed to stuff.

There was a bunch of this on Drupal.org awhile back, you'd get patches in the issue queue where someone just ran phpcs on the whole module.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#33

Post by sjrd »

SirSavary wrote: post #2

It's convenient that Digital Ocean has a scapegoat for 2020 but his video doesn't explain the previous years of spammy pull requests.

Absolutely. That guy's video may have caused a lot of spammy PRs, but I'm pretty sure they're far from the majority.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#34

Post by aexl »

higerordermap wrote: post #23

This is not only kind of spam going on here. A twitter user mentioned that some youtubers are themselves creating assignment aggregation type repos, and encouraging their viewers to contribute some copy paste code to those repos and they approve the pull request. That's insane. I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian.

These type of repositories have existed since the first Hacktoberfest. They might even be useful for beginners to learn how to prepare their first pull request. But the idea of Hacktoberfest is clearly not to submit all your pull requests to such a repository.

It even seems as though DigitalOcean is blocking these type of repositories. From the FAQ:

My pull request is marked as being on an excluded repository. What does this mean?

Unfortunately, your pull request was made on a repository that doesn’t align with the core values of Hacktoberfest. We’ve decided that pull requests made to this repository will not count toward completing the challenge.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#37

Post by neom »

Google234 wrote: post #12

The shitoberfest Twitter account is hilarious. https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest

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 at DigitalOcean was "just for marketing" - everything we did was because we genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all the vitriol. Maybe it's gone off the rails and needs to be revised or reconsidered, but creating "shitoberfest" twitter and putting things in blog posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive. (I haven't worked at DigitalOcean for 5+ years)

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#38

Post by kgurnani »

lipstone wrote: post #22

If everything that CodeWithHarry says is true, then I don't see how it's his fault. Also, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Just ignore the spammy emails for a while and close the pull requests.

I speak hindi, and in fact he is actually encouraging spam and is BSing in the response. He has said to look for repos with low traffic and do a pull request changing the readme and to do it 20 times, so if most will be marked as invalid, at least 4 wont.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#39

Post by cbanek »

fergie wrote: 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…

I have done one letter typo fixes to doc repos as a 3rd party and felt great about them. One of them was actually a typo in a command line that I found by going through their instructions step by step copying and pasting each line. I was seriously confused when it didn't work!

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#40

Post by chillee »

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?

Amazing Project is more relevant, but if you take a look at those issues (sorted by newest), you see that most of the PRs that show aren't spam at all: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project&s=created...

If you want to count how many spam PRs were directly inspired by the video, you can try searching "an amazing project" (with quotes), and filtering by newest. It looks like there have only been about 50 PRs directly inspired by it.

https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%22an+amazing+project%22&...

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