I'm not familiar with rules, can i open repo with hactoberfest hashtag with bot that accepts all PRs? would that help to game the system and redirect most of that spam to one place? I don't want to encourage this behavior, but let's be honest it's hard to stop now, so maybe redirecting all harm to one please would help OSS projects?
I genuinely like the hacktoberfest shirts, so every October I just make a new GH Repo with some text files that I make 5 PRs for, this has worked for the last 6 years lol
Really not sure why people bother spamming other repos when you can just make your own
I'd be curious about how many developers actually start their Open Source journey with such a drive-by contribution, compared with how many do it only for the t-shirt. While every new productive contributor is an incredible win for an Open Source project, sifting and rejecting drive-by pull requests puts severe load on projects that mostly rely on voluntary contributions. All of this just to allocate some t-shirts. Not surprised if commercial projects will completely opt out of hacktoberfest if this continues.
The simplest solution would be to eliminate the rule that started to encourage this behavior. It's sad, but this is why we can't have nice things.
This is already done on an annual basis. Git repos spring up every October purely to accept PRs, no matter how trivial. They regularly make it to the top of the trending repos list.
I think DO excludes them from the final count though. It doesn't stop people from trying.
