Hacktoberfest 2020 Drama

It's now October and time for the annual Hactoberfest which is marketed as the month-long festival of supporting and contributing to open-source. This event has been going on for seven years now and even though I believe the idea behind it is good, it seems this year people have started trying to game the system for a free t-shirt.

On October 1st, creators of open source projects started getting spammed with insane Pull Requests. Most of them just adding the words "amazing project" to readme's. It got so bad someone even created a parody Twitter account to highlight some of the worst offenders. Then a few hours later Github even released a new feature to help combat it.

According to Joel Thoms this started all from a Youtuber:

This flood of low quality PR spam appears to come from a YouTuber with an audience of 672K where he demonstrates how easy it is to make a Pull Request to a repo.
Where he went wrong was demonstrating a low quality PR, thus setting the bar low for his viewers who went on to copy exactly what he did.

Finally, Hacktoberfest made an announcement with how they are planning on preventing this in the future and other details behind the open-source DDOS.

In past years, we tried labelling issues “invalid” and “spam” to deter participants from spamming repositories. Unfortunately this has not made as much impact as we had hoped. Therefore, we’re adding new ways to discourage participants from spamming.
For maintainers, we’re building on an existing idea and doubling down on an excluded repository list for Hacktoberfest. If you don’t want pull requests to your repositories counted toward Hacktoberfest, send us the info in an email to hacktoberfestmaintainers@digitalocean.com.
We are also implementing a banning system that reviews and bans users with with too many flagged PR’s. This can result in exclusion from all future Hacktoberfests, not just this one.
This year, we’re also extending the validation period from one week to 14 days. This will give maintainers more time to review pull requests before contributors earn their shirts.

It's sad when things like this happen and more so when it's within the open-source community we all love and use. From the sounds of everything, this was a minor hiccup and many systems have already been put in place to prevent scamming the system. I'm sure they'll learn from this and make some major adjustments for next year.

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