As a few commenters have noted, Hacktoberfest has had spam problems in the past, mostly due to folks chasing a free t-shirt without thinking about what they're actually doing to achieve that. I'm super sorry about that, it's not what we want this program to be.
In response to the massive spam wave we saw in 2020 with the program, we made some substantial changes to the rules for Hacktoberfest (during the 2020 event, and since) to help reduce the level of spam:
- Hacktoberfest is opt-in for maintainers. They need to add the "hacktoberfest" topic to their repos.
- Contributors are only rewarded for PR/MRs that maintainers accept. Merging, overall approving review, or the "hacktoberfest-accepted" label count.
- Contributors that have two or more PR/MRs identified as spam (either via our automated logic, or maintainers labeling a PR/MR as "spam") will be disqualified permanently.
As always, we're open to feedback on what more folks think could be done to avoid spam with the program, while still keeping it accessible to new folks that want to contribute to open source. hacktoberfest at digitalocean dot com is the place to send that feedback <3