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Jess Lee Subscriber for The DEV Team

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An Update on Hacktoberfest ❤️

Update 10/5/20: PRs can now be made in any participating GitHub-hosted repository/project. Your PRs will count toward your participation if they are in a repo with the hacktoberfest topic and once they have been merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as hacktoberfest-accepted.

Maintainers can opt-in to participate by classifying their projects with the hacktoberfest topic (find a list of opted-in projects here). however, any PR with the hacktoberfest-accepted label, submitted to any public GitHub repository, with or without the hacktoberfest topic, will be considered valid.

From DigitalOcean:

A note to contributors: For participants who have already worked hard to complete Hacktoberfest 2020, we will honor all the participants who have submitted valid pull requests prior to 2020-10-03 12:00:00 UTC on a per pull request basis. We’re really excited to see what you continue to contribute! To find all the participating repositories visit the Hacktoberfest home page or go directly to the list on Github.

A note to maintainers: Due to this change, it will no longer be necessary for you to opt out of Hacktoberfest. As a maintainer participating in Hacktoberfest, you’ll want to classify your with the Hacktoberfest topic and apply hacktoberfest-accepted labels to pull requests you want to accept. We’ve included a few gifs below to show you how simple this can be.”

Update 10/1/20: We’ve coordinated with our friends at DigitalOcean to suggest measures for reducing the volume of low-effort and spam PRs this Hacktoberfest. Please read their entire update on this year’s changes here.

It’s officially Hacktoberfest! We’re looking forward to a month of celebrating and advancing open-source with the help of contributors and maintainers alike.
As you may have seen here on DEV or elsewhere on social media, an important conversation is evolving about the impact of spammy Hacktoberfest pull requests.

Hacktoberfest is meant to be a force of good for the open-source ecosystem, and it’s disappointing when people view this celebration as an opportunity to merely win free swag. Maintainers invest their valuable time and energy into managing important projects, and we should respect and appreciate their efforts and ensure we’re not making their lives more difficult. As a co-sponsor of Hacktoberfest, we have been chatting with the DigitalOcean team throughout the day about how we can best promote valuable contributions this month.

With that being said, we are still super excited about this month of open-source collaboration and community learning. DigitalOcean will soon be announcing some positive changes to Hacktoberfest based on their open dialogue project maintainers. Until then, it’s still Hacktoberfest and we hope you participate!

If you’re looking for help on a project, please don’t hesitate to ask in the help thread:

We’ll keep you posted as soon as we have more updates. Until then, happy coding!

Top comments (15)

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ankitbeniwal profile image
Ankit Beniwal

Excluded Repository List and Extended Verification period ❤️❤️

I hope the spamming will now be reduced to a great extent. Very well done Dev and DO Team.

If you don’t want pull requests to your repositories counted toward Hacktoberfest, send the info in an email to hacktoberfestmaintainers@digitaloc...

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vgoff profile image
Victor Goff

Sending the e-mail to them is not as quick and easy for everyone as probably changing the topic on the repository to have nohacktoberfest there. Small action for maintainers, and programmatic check for them.

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ankitbeniwal profile image
Ankit Beniwal • Edited

Yeah. I completely agree with that. In fact, an opt-out checkbox like that of Arctic Code Vault can simplify this thing and can save time.

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vgoff profile image
Victor Goff

Looks like the updated communication on DO has exactly stated using the topics on the repository for this purpose. Glad to see it.

A little bit confused on the 1 NOV deadline for maintainers to approve contributions that may have been made only one minute before the deadline though. They used to give us 7 days to filter. Now it has been reduced on the backend…?

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scrabill profile image
Shannon Crabill

Yes, I'm happy to see DEV and the DO team are working together to help reduce spam. I know it's causing a lot of stress for project maintainers.

💪

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graciegregory profile image
Gracie Gregory (she/her)

🌱

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king11 profile image
Lakshya Singh

Yeah will go for plant this year :))

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netlicensing profile image
Labs64 NetLicensing

That's amazing! In the very first hours of October, we received already some valuable contributions for the Labs64 OpenSource repositories at GitHub.

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shunjid profile image
Shunjid Rahman Showrov

To maintain quality, not just the contributors but also the maintainers should come forward too.

A maintainer is mostly well aware of his/her project. As a participant, I expect maintainers to elaborate their issues in details with some workflow of the corresponding activity and the unexpected behaviour happening around.

Not just like opening an issue and saying "Hey guys, fix this problem" with no further details. Afterall, Contributors are human not the genie of Alaadin.

😇

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

FYI the way I handle that I create issues that don't need a lot of context, label them with "good first issue" using an issue template which starts by asking people to read the CONTRIBUTING guide

Worked really well so far, I'm happy to report that in a couple of days, I got 7 meaningfull pull requests and 0 spam.

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shunjid profile image
Shunjid Rahman Showrov • Edited

That sounds cool, Fayard. 🎉

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aliyarahmani profile image
Aliya Rahmani

Why my review time has increased to 15 days?
It says- In Review
Your PR has been accepted by a maintainer and is currently within the review period, which lasts for fourteen days.
Will I get my T-Shirt?

P.S.- Beginner doubts

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developerkaren profile image
Karen Efereyan

Yes we're participating. Thanks

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anugya profile image
Anugya

I made some pull requests before October 3 (that is, before this update) which were merged. Will they count towards completing Hacktoberfest?

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graciegregory profile image
Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Edited

Hi there! I'm sharing an excerpt from DigitalOcean's recent statement that should answer your question!

"We will honor all valid pull requests prior to this change, and as of October 3, 2020 at 12:00:00 UTC – and October 3 in all time zones – pull requests will only count toward earning a T-shirt or planting a tree if they are submitted in a repository classified with the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic. The pull requests will also need to be merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as ‘hacktoberfest-accepted’ in order to qualify. The deadline for completions, merging, labeling, and approving is November 1."