There are hot discussions that in this year Hacktoberfest goes not so well:
- https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
- https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2ux69/digitaloceans_hacktoberfest_is_hurting_open_source/?sort=top
People are doing spammy meaningless PRs. It didn’t happen 2 years ago before because there were “Make your first PR here” meaningless repositories where you can commit your name in a long txt file and get your kinda free T-shirt. Next year, Hacktoberfest organizers targeted “quality over quantity” and decided to ban such repositories, forcing people to do something significant. And here we are.
The fun thing that you can create your own repo, do 4 dummy PRs in it, and you’re done. However, the target audience doesn’t know about it. So, Hacktoberfest team decided to take fast actions and communicate this workaround to all participants: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update
This is one more “rule that massively backfired”. Read in this thread more such stories: https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1311300651645767682
This is why we can’t have nice things.