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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

No mention that I can see in the landing page about the fiasco that the last 2 Hacktoberfest were (didn't they even have to cancel the one last year mid-way?). I feel like this has gone from one of the most beloved events in the Open Source community, to one of the most dreaded.

Edit: found it, there's mention of it in the Participating subpage, in a couple of subsections (including "SPAM"). However, it still doesn't look too promising, since it seems to put the burden of flagging it as SPAM on the maintainers:

> "PR/MRs that are labeled with a label containing the word “spam” by maintainers will not be counted. [...] PR/MRs that our system detects as spammy will also not be counted."

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I dunno man, the whole thing seemed overblown to me. They quickly reacted by correcting the participation rules to avoid problems. The whole thing is opt-in now.

When you are hurting the community you are pretending to help[1], and refuse to listen to them[2], then it's definitely a bad thing. Remember that most popular OSS devs are already walking a fine line, adding an extra burden to them is Not Nice™ IMHO.

[1] https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/

[2] https://twitter.com/domenic/status/1311355857465225218

But this time it's opt-in, so that does change things, right?

> and refuse to listen to them

Are you suggesting they should be opt-out instead of opt-in?

They made changes in reaction to the feedback.

Do you mean that unless they "stop this annual tradition" as requested by this one tweet, they are "refusing to listen to the community"?

The year that this blew up the DigitalOcean team (I was on this team) met with nearly 100 open source maintainers over the course of weeks to ask their opinions on Hacktoberfest and how we could make it better. We opened up these roundtables to anyone who would attend, and had great attendance from major projects such a Kubernetes, CPython, Gentoo, and others. We took all of this feedback and immediately changed the program. Many maintainers in the community have lauded us for these changes both publicly and in private.

We did listen to the community and we made the program better.

If you’re a participant, only PRs against repos that opt-in to Hacktoberfest will be counted. So that solves the spam problem immediately.

The change they made last year, which remains in effect, is that repos have to opt in. It probably should have been that way all along.

What is the requisite amount of time to keep bringing up the past? In 2020 a problem was identified, the team acted on it, and has since improved the program.

How long should they have to continue to apologize for an honest mistake while trying to do good?

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