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Comment by kylemh | Hacker News Reader

WOW! I have had a wildly different experience. Really sorry to see that it has caused you so much stress.

I run engineering at Operation Code https://operationcode.org/ https://github.com/operationcode/

We've been massive fans of Hacktoberfest for the last 3 years because it has brought a MINIMUM 300% increase in quality pull requests compared to even the next best month of the year.

I even put my own money on the line to double down on the incentives with extra prizes in exchange for resolving multiple issues. I've made friends and long-term coding partners from the event as well.

I hope they never end Hacktoberfest, but I think they should definitely offer the ability for you to signal/flag that you're not interested in participating as a repository.

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I feel the same way, and have a similar experience. Me and many of my friends and co-workers are always excited for October and make meaningful contributions.

I understand there's negative consequences, I also anecdotally believe that Hacktoberfest is a net positive for open source.

That said, last year many repositories popped up with the sole purpose of letting people make garbage PR's to hit the minimum. I have a hard time understanding why someone who is a developer and wants the shirt is comfortable doing this, when all you have to do to really earn it is making meaningful improvements to someone's `README.md`.

> I think they should definitely offer the ability for you to signal/flag that you're not interested in participating as a repository.

not good enough. it needs to be opt-in. why is a random private company generating even more work for open source maintainers?

Sure, I’m fine with that!

Meh, this is the classic situation where one individual (either a person or a company) starts speaking for everybody (or everybody in a category).

And of course one size does not fit all.

From DO's policy statement on quality:

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#quality

> There's a seven-day review window for all pull requests before they count toward completing the challenge. Once a participant has submitted four eligible pull requests (ready-to-review, not drafts), the review window begins. This period gives maintainers time to identify and label spammy pull requests as invalid. If the pull requests are not marked as invalid within that window, they will allow the user to complete the Hacktoberfest challenge. If any of the pull requests are labeled as invalid, the user will return to the pending state until they have four eligible pull requests, at which point the review period will start again.<

So all the spammer needs are four projects with maintainers who are too busy IRL to flag spam posted to their repos?

Are we all now to be unpaid conscripts of DO's marketing department?

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