Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

+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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com