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Comment by google234123 | Hacker News Reader

I posted something similar in the other thread about this. This change probably kills Hacktoberfest imo. What maintainers would want to subject themselves to spam PRs by opting-in. Anyway, I feel like allowing PRs before this point to count as valid is a bad idea. I would guess that 70k people already submitted 4 spam PRs in their own repo by now following the tutorials that have been posted for this.

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I have a Pebble smartwatch app[1] that only I have ever worked on (aside from one PR to change an icon). I don't really expect anyone else to contribute, but it would be neat.

I just opted it in to Hacktoberfest. Best case scenario, I actually get a great PR because someone was looking for Hacktoberfest-eligible repos and thought my app looked cool. Worst-case scenario, I get a bunch of spam PRs that I reject—but since I basically never get any PRs, this doesn't seem like such a huge problem.

[1]: https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/Pebble-RSS-Reader

> Worst-case scenario, I get a bunch of spam PRs that I reject—but since I basically never get any PRs, this doesn't seem like such a huge problem.

That's what I thought. Now I'm getting spammed with PRs containing personal insults.

Take care.

I suggest adding the hacktobefest label to issues you'd like to see tackled. Many people search for `label:hacktoberfest language:Rust is:open` or the likes to find projects to contribute to. I have not found a way to search for repos with a repo-tag yet.

> I have not found a way to search for repos with a repo-tag yet.

https://github.com/topics/hacktoberfest

I personally wouldn't participate in Hacktoberfest after this. I'd never want to be seen wearing the t-shirt they'd give out after all the spam and drama. At this point wearing it would probably give the wrong impression to the people who are actually invested in OSS.

> This change probably kills Hacktoberfest imo.

I'd say the spam tactics executed on such a large scale killed Hacktoberfest. This is just damage control.

Repos were being tagged as hacktoberfest-friendly by maintainers long before it was mandatory.

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