Six Hacktoberfest spam PRs have been sent to the HTML Standard in just one day | Hacker News Reader

Six Hacktoberfest spam PRs have been sent to the HTML Standard in just one day

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I like this one:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/7139/files

I think this is almost funny. If it weren't so sad.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/7137/files

"You get what you measure".

I remember this happening last year too.

Here's what I don't understand about this drama: is it really a serious burden to just deny these PRs? It looks like these are immediately obvious as spam, so the it's hard for me to see how it's a time sink.

6 additional things a day to pay attention to for a month straight is cognitively challenging for a lot of people. A lot of people are dealing with sustained burnout. Stop to look at spam, in my email, isn’t a burden for me. I just don’t look at it. But stop and look at spam in my PRs? That’s triage. And a context switch. If it’s a larger volume it makes looking at non-spam just as onerous because everything needs extra scrutiny.

I dont disagree with your assessment. Only the applicability of reason. If you're so close to your limit that you're incapable of closing an additional 6 spam PRs daily for a month. 6 spam PRs a month isn't really the real problem you're facing; thus the comment you responded to is correct that it shouldn't be this much of a big deal.

All of that said, I don't actually think anyone is really complaining about it's severity. My impression was the complaint was trivial by intent. Choosing to complain about spam because it's a near universal agreed 'bad thing'. Not because it's actually imposing enough to demand attention, just hey DO, can you do something to discourage low effort spam?

> If you're so close to your limit that you're incapable of closing an additional 6 spam PRs daily for a month. 6 spam PRs a month isn't really the real problem you're facing; thus the comment you responded to is correct that it shouldn't be this much of a big deal.

I’m 18 months into pretty severe burnout, spent 6 months unemployed and burned through all of my savings. I have difficulty with executive function at my best, and it’s severely degraded. But I have to work. I’m not the only one, a lot of people are struggling.

Maybe it sounds trivial to you, but six additional things I have to address each day sounds exhausting. That’s not so easily dismissible to me.

6 spam PRs are trivial. The amount of thought they require after learning the source of the first is Hacktober,isn't much more than finding the close and lock button. But I get the distinct impression you didn't read what I actually implied was the problem. From the effectively nothing I know about your daily life. I can still say 6 spam pulls on github isn't a problem you should be complaining about. The problem you have, one that sounds similar to the one I'm also getting killed by. But a bit of extra spam isn't significant, it's merely an extra light straw, resting on what might be an already broken back.

I’m not going to argue with you about what I find burdensome. I’ve spent my entire life trying to, it hasn’t done me any good. I hear that you’re struggling too. Take care.

It's not trivial. Just like needing to answer your door six times extra per day for a whole month. It's annoying, distracting from other work

Going to be honest. I really feel like people are making a larger deal out of this than it is.

It takes what, 15 seconds to realize a PR is stupid. Close it and lock the conversation.

This is always possible when you use platforms like github. You have to interact with outside variables. Don't like it? Turn off all collaboration.

Seriously this is one of the least annoying things about managing open source projects, and it's lead to people getting interested in collaboration.

Also if you hate dealing with stupid PRs then open source development really might not be for you.

I can deal with the occasional weird person on public transit. However, if a random company were incentivizing people to be intentionally weird on public transit as part of some social experiment, I'd be pretty pissed.

Is DO trying to get people to open spam PRs? Or is it just noise generated by trolls trying to game the system?

Scroll through last year at https://twitter.com/shitoberfest?s=09 and you'll likely change your mind.

I've seen this. I honestly still can't see it as a big deal.

Especially with the changes DO has made this time around.

If you don't want these low effort PRs then don't opt into hacktoberfest?

Though, I can see a lot of stuff in the twitter tag where people are making PRs on repos that haven't opted in.

Maybe DO should just not do hacktoberfest anymore.

So everyone likes to hate on Hacktoberfest, but how many projects have benefited from it, and to what degree? I know that's probably much harder to measure since we can't really know what PRs would have not been sent without Hacktoberfest.

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