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Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

It seems it will be necessary for DO to put more of a burden on potential t-shirt recipients to prove that they are making valid PRs and acting in good faith.

A first step would be to only allow contributions to selected projects that have first approved to be included in Hacktoberfest.

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Yes, especially since they don't seem to be willing to dedicate more to policing this - apparently everything related to it is handled by one employee, who's obviously limited in what they can do: https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311392743885869057

Maybe accounts eligible to get the t-shirts should be only the ones that have a certain amount of past contributions. Like at least a year old? Maybe that would be unfair to recent contributors, but there's always next year. Just like you can't perform some actions on Stack Overflow before you achieve a minimum reputation score.

Are Hacktoberfest contributions checked by an API now? Could you not require the maintainers to tag the PR "Hacktoberfest contributed" and only that would get you a tee? People would know not to submit junk because the maintainers wouldn't give them the label for junk.

That would be an order of magnitude more maintainer effort than flagging spam is right now. Not to mention that the number of maintainers being aware of this event is probably quite low.

How is it more effort to label legitimate PRs than to label spam PRs? Are you saying legitimate PRs are an order of magnitude more than spammy PRs? Because it sure doesn't look like it.

> Are you saying legitimate PRs are an order of magnitude more than spammy PRs? Because it sure doesn't look like it.

The numbers quoted elsethread look like that to me. Not necessarily the full 10x difference, of course, but choosing just between these two systems it appears clear to me that there would be more work for maintainers and/or significantly less people being eligible for T-Shirts because few maintainers are actually aware of Hacktoberfest if every PR had to be tagged by the maintainer to count for eligibility.

DO knows that that would instantly kill their marketing campaign since no project in their right mind would willingly participate.

Why do you say that? Several people here said they have been helped by it. Seems they would.

If all the spam commits are suddenly focused on only participating repos, that will quickly change.

Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to really know without trying it and measuring.

Loads of projects, particularly recent ones, would gladly welcome any help and increase in visibility.

I dream of the day I can walk into a job interview and brag about how many PRs my Open Source projects have to reject per day. Maybe that's just my Nobody Privilege talking though.

This is called opt-in and is suggested in the article.

Or requiring that open PRs must have +N lines in non-text/markdown/config/dependency files

That would be way too easy to game.

How about improving compilation time thousand-folds: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/447

Huh, does he think he's funny? Spamming the Linux kernel git seems like a good way to be considered a major wanker. And doing it from a non-throwaway Github account?

Linux kernel doesn’t use GitHub so it’s not really spamming actual devs.

I love that this PR has 2 commits and the second one is just adding a newline to follow convention.

Docs have a lot of value - and bad docs are a huge barrier others who might contribute. No reason to ban doc improvements.

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