https://github.com/MattIPv4/hacktoberfest-data#diving-in-pul...
> "Of the 483,127 PRs submitted during Hacktoberfest, only 23,299 (4.82%) were identified as spam"
That is insanely high noise for hacktoberfest, especially when tagging spam "correctly" takes a non-insignificant amount of effort from the maintainers.
I was ready to rant about this post but … no, wow, this is very much warranted.
Here you go, you're an open source maintainer already in an often thankless role, take some extra work, with a side dollop of extra work labelling the crap extra work you're getting.
So, the spammers are probably intentionally targeting repos where folks aren't likely to bother marking as spam.
On a separate note, I do not understand why people care so much about mid-quality t-shirts...
Most likely a mix of "it's free", "it's easy", and "it looks nice on a CV". Perfect storm for a lot of students and juniors to spend an hour of their time on, without bothering to spend the extra two to actually make the contributions useful.
No kidding. GitHub requires you to wait several minutes (they don't say how much time exactly, but in my experience it's definitely > 2 min) between reporting something as spam. So you can't just go through your spam PRs in the morning and report them easily, you need to leave the browser tabs open and come back from time to time to submit spam reports. Not reporting is much easier, so the real figures are certainly higher.
EDIT: Ah, they don't even mean reporting spam to GitHub. Maintainers need to "opt in" to Hacktoberfest's own rules and change their own PR labeling system according to Hacktoberfest's wishes. What a pile of nonsense.
> Of the 483,127 PRs submitted during Hacktoberfest, only 23,299 (4.82%) were identified as spam, with 19,587 (84.07%) of those being in a repository that the Hacktoberfest team excluded from the competition for not following the shared values and 3,712 (15.93%) being labeled as "invalid" by project maintainers.
Spam submissions were sent to spam repositories, that hasn't been known for years.
From the article, they act like it's their burden alone:
> Their solution, per their FAQ, is to put the burden solely on the shoulders of maintainers.
But, as a contributor, I see plenty of links for me all over Hacktoberfest to report repositories that are also trying to skirt the system.
No, I didn't read the FAQ, but I imagine neither did a lot of maintainers, especially those that don't participate. The undercounting must be massive.