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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

I'll create some repos that are nothing but

     /* comments */

and welcome any and all pull requests! This way everyone can be an FOSS contributor and win t-shirts and stickers.

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If you had read Hacktoberfest's previous blog post on this matter. They even encouraged those spammers to create a repo on their own github account and create 4 PRs within those repos just to get qualified for the T-shirts but I think anyways the damage has been done and by providing T-shirts to those spammers they're not penalizing their behavior any ways.

I imagine a sea of furrowed brows aimed at those showing up to conferences wearing a Hacktoberfest shirt.

I don't really get why that is a bad thing. It is better that they do it there, on their own repos, than spam maintainers as it is right now. And you want people to learn how to make a repo and do PRs right? Let's have them practice on their own. Do you really need the t-shirt to be some mark of super-hackers?

It sounds like that just moves the spam from worthless PRs to worthless repos, which may even be more harmful in the long-run.

Worthless repos are fine. Microsoft can afford the storage costs and the long tail is already long and doesn't bother anyone.

if you read through the thread, you'll find there are already plenty of repos like that.

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