For those not in the know: Hacktoberfest is an annual event that takes place every October. It is hosted by Digital Ocean to motivate developers to send pull requests to open source repositories. All participants receive a T-shirt as a gift for their contribution. There are practically no restrictions: if a pull request goes to any repository, you get a T-shirt. Super.
Catastrophe
Suddenly, some frenzy began on Twitter. Before the month began, posts from the owners of open source repositories began to appear with complaints about pull requests of extremely low quality, or even outright spam.
Please stop spamming #hacktoberfest for a free t-shirt
Yes! My inbox is full of idiotic PRs from #hacktoberfest. Some people just add a dash to the readme and stuff like that.
Hi I'm @shitoberfest. Are you running an open source project? Then take screenshots of all the garbage that was thrown to you at #hacktoberfest, and send them with the @shitoberfest tag to make it easier for us to collect and share information.
There are also those who speak about their motives in plain text:
Here is the best PR of the fifty we got today. A person at least in the forehead declares why he is doing it.
On the screenshot: Pzhlsta, accept PR to give me a T-shirt
Ugh, this is somehow getting on your nerves. Looks like I was the victim of @digitalocean's Hacktoberfest spam.
Even the Covid19Tracking repository got it.
We are tracking the spread of covid in the US ... and now it looks like PR rejection with spam as well.
Someone even created a special @shitoberfest account to track the extent of the problem .
Causes
The source of this rush of spam PR dummies appears to be the owner of a Youtube channel with 672k subscribers, who posted a video showing how easy it is to submit a pull request to the repository. He made a big mistake by showing the process with a pull request with zero value. Thus, he made his subscribers understand that the bar was set very low, and they began to repeat his actions exactly.
I hate to give a direct link and catch up with this channel, so instead, I link to a Twitter post that shows the fateful moment.
This youtuber with 672k subscribers encourages people to submit LOW QUALITY PR to #hacktoberfest. I don't approve.
Reaction
The reaction of the owner of the CodeWithHarry account to what happened was, to put it mildly, weak. No apologies were made; instead, the blogger points to repeated mentions in the video of the fact that pull requests should be useful. This, in his opinion, removes responsibility from him.
I kindly ask everyone not to send spam as pull requests to the repository on GitHub! Some people think that I have compromised the open source community. In my video, I just wanted to inspire people to participate in events that involve working on open source projects, to explain to them what a pull request is and how it's generally done!
, , . , - , pull request-, : , , . , pull request-. (0:55 – , , 07:51 – , 10:58, 11:10). 05:33 – , , , . !
And I agree that at events like hacktoberfest it is better to introduce a rule that only meaningful pull requests are counted. But this has been discussed for a long time, from the very first years of hacktoberfest. And I also want to say that many have created an account on GitHub, learned how to create pull requests and made real, valuable contributions to open source projects. I am proud of these people and I hope that the rest of the developer community behaves decently too.
Thanks. Harry.
However, placing a fixed post with this text is perhaps the least that he could do to somehow suspend the orgy.
How do you know that this is the handiwork of CodeWithHarry?
Here is a screenshot of the list of pull requests that went into the micromtn repository . Each of them looks something like this:
This is very similar to the pull request that was shown as an example in the video.
If you run a search on the phrase improve docs, 319,251 results are returned. Searching for the phrase Amazing Project currently yields 21,177 matches.
The owner of CodeWithHarry is not a villain, I do not want to be publicly crucified. We are all human, that’s already there. Considering how many subscribers he has, his videos have definitely proven useful to so many. But he took the wrong step, and the responsibility for the consequences falls on him. And the consequences so far make a sad impression.
At the moment, his GitHub profile is redirecting to a 404 page. It is not clear if he has been deleted, put into private mode, or renamed. And yet only one day has passed.
Even Digital Ocean itself spoke out about this failure.
We found that most of the spam originated from a contributor with a large online audience who openly encouraged the community to participate in spamming and even provided ideas on how to get around the rules .
In general, the smoke is a rocker. We just have to wait to see how it all ends.
UPD
The article went to the top on Hacker News , in the comments you can find more information.
GitHub took action :
Want to take a breather or limit the number of people who can submit a pull request to your repository? Now you can set interaction restrictions for the desired period. You can find this feature under the path project settings ›moderation settings› interaction limits.
Digital Ocean also took action :
We have heard you and are introducing the biggest innovation in the entire history of the event. Projects and their owners are now officially participating in @ Hacktoberfest 2020 by consent only! We are happy to announce this change, which will improve the quality of content, and we look forward to your contributions.
UPDATE: Now only projects whose owners have given their consent to participate in Hacktoberfest - it's easy to sign up to join: add hacktoberfest to the list of topics in the repository. Thank you for your patience in our Hacktoberfest continuous improvement process!