Why is the 'Send a program fix and get a T-shirt' campaign annoying developers?



It is the world's largest scale of the festival that takes place around October in Germany

Oktoberfest in honor of, DigitalOcean 'Hacktoberfest' has been held every year in October, the first arrival and send four pull request to the public repository of GitHub 5 This is a campaign where T-shirts are given to everyone. Google engineer Domenic Denicola points out that Hacktoberfest is 'a company-led DDoS attack on the open source community.'

DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source
https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/

Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean
https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/



Since the start of the 2020 Hacktoberfest, Denicola's GitHub project has received a lot of spam pull requests. Due to the large number of spam requests due to these T-shirt desires, Denicola says he spends his time checking each pull request, tagging it for spam and reporting it to GitHub. I am.



This is an example of a pull request that is spam. This pull request, entitled 'Improved Docs,' simply adds '### Great Work' to the documentation. It seems that Digital Ocean, the organizer of Hacktoberfest, is also aware of this problem, but the

FAQ of Hacktoberfest states that 'If you find a spam pull request, please close the request with a spam tag'. The situation is that the repository administrator is left to deal with spam.



Denicola's tweet, 'Oh, October has begun,' said, 'I'm sorry I didn't enjoy it. Tag it to prevent you from winning T-shirts at Hacktoberfest, or exclude the repository from Hacktoberfest. Many sympathetic voices have been received, such as the reply, 'It's also a hand.'



The Twitter account ' #shitoberfest ', which summarizes spam acts instigated by Hacktoberfest, has attracted more than 3000 followers even though it was just opened in October 2020, and people who are annoyed by Hacktoberfest You can see that there are not a few.



It was also pointed out that the movie explaining 'How to easily send a pull request' posted by YouTuber ' CodeWithHarry ' who has more than 600,000 subscribers has lowered the hurdle to make a spam pull request. .. The movie is private at the time of writing the article.



Denicola suggests three ways to deal with these spam pull requests. The first is to put a spam label on the pull request and send an email to '[email protected]', but it takes time and effort.

If you are comfortable with rejecting pull requests from new users unconditionally, it is also effective to use the interaction restriction function that temporarily restricts pull requests and comments. Previously, you could only enable the limit for up to 24 hours, but GitHub has announced that it has extended the limit to a maximum of 6 months, as if at the timing of the Hacktoberfest.



The last resort cannot be done by the individual administrator, but GitHub itself blocks API access from DigitalOcean. 'Digital Ocean certainly makes GitHub an unpleasant place, and I hope GitHub will seriously consider how to curb such corporate-led attacks on the open source community,' said Denicola. comment.

'Hacktoberfest isn't about open source, it's about burning open source administrators,' Denicola said.

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