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Comment by mundo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sympathetic, but I'd be interested to know whether there's also an increase in non-spam contributions. We probably need to wait a while to find out, since it's reasonable to expect the spammy t-shirt-seeking PRs to be front-loaded and the substantive PRs (if any materialize) to take some time.

edit: and it's worth saying, sometimes a newbie's first PR is pretty indistinguishable from spam. It would be ironic if one of the results of this project was teaching a bunch of young programmers that they're not needed or wanted in FOSS.

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Last year, in addition to usual work by long-term contributors, my project got four useful bugfixes (all from the same person and taken from our recommended first contributions list), a few trivial typo fixes, and no spam.

I've seen people say they benefit from Hacktoberfest and some people say they get a lot of spam, and it's hard to know which outnumbers which, but I don't think anyone should be saying with confidence that it's a pure negative, and I think DigitalOcean's suggested fixes (disallow new accounts, disallow people who've gotten too many contributions marked as spam) are probably the right direction to go.

I was at a wonderful Hacktober event last year (thanks, Setlog and FOSS-AG!) and think some pretty good stuff came out of it. The incentive to submit low quality PRs became quite obvious quite quickly however.

My gut says that Hacktober probably spawns some productive contributions, but most of them would likely have been submitted anyway.

From my perspective last year as a first time participant in other people's open source projects, I don't think I would've made any of the contributions I did without Hacktoberfest.

Projects tagged with the Hacktoberfest tag tended to signal either projects that were both active and had low barriers of entry for newbies, or weird mechanical turk-esque spam. While the latter is unfortunate, the former isn't nearly as easy to find as it should be the other 11 months of the year.

Last year, that was not the case.

I'm sure there's a bump in non-spam contributions as I have submitted them and know others who have too, but I suspect it is a small fraction compared to the T-shirt spammy seekers as numbers have grown over the years.

I myself have submitted small PRs during Hacktoberfest but they were still meaningful corrections and in addition to at least 5 significant contributions. We do need better signalling. I tend to pick projects I already follow or have been tagged for Hacktoberfest.

I get where you're coming from but I think you're missing the point. The issue seems to be that even if there are good contributions coming in their benefit is disproportionately outweighed by the work and disruption caused by the large volume of spammy PR submissions.

As an open source maintainer, I'd gladly sift through a mountain of spammy PRs (heck closing 4 per hour, as called out in the article, is almost zero trouble), if it means even a handful of real significant progress and issues fixed and potential future maintainers.

+1. I feel the same way. If one out of 20 drive-by contributors stick around and become regular, that would be a real win for me. (I'm currently maintaining a project with 20k GitHub stars and we have four regular contributors.)

That's a big if.

Well this thing has been running for a few years now so I'm sure someone has that data

https://github.com/MattIPv4/hacktoberfest-data

A snapshot of one year's participation in that specific period isn't too relevant to what we are discussing, because it doesn't track sustained future contributions by those same users.

That's a good point. Wonder if they're be open to adding something like that...?

Maybe suggest that in an issue on that stats tracking repo?

In theory they are. In practise the lack of a test dataset - and the lack of access to their dataset - means it's virtually impossible for a third party to make any significant contribution to the data processing code.

Such an effort would have to start with them voluneering a test dataset and/or schema.

I have asked - https://github.com/MattIPv4/hacktoberfest-data/issues/5

I'm not missing that point, I'm asking whether it's true. The right way to answer that would probably be to find out how many of the new submitters from previous years went on to continue to become valuable contributors.

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