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How to contribute to 👩💻👨💻 Hacktoberfest and not 💩 shitoberfest
From Hacktoberfest...
HacktoberFest is an event organized every year in October by Digital Ocean to encourage participation in Open Source.
Concretely, you register with your GitHub account on The dedicated site of the event and we have one month to make 5 Pull Requests (PRs).
If you meet these requirements, you will receive a free T-shirt and stickers some time later. Since this year there is also an ecological option: you can choose instead of receiving a T-shirt to have a tree planted.
... at shitoberfest
The event started yesterday and has already garnered a lot of (virtual) attention on Twitter, so much so that a hashtag and a Twitter account @shitoberfest were created. Many open source maintainers have complained about spam PRs that are harmful to their (volunteer) work because they now have to deal with PRs that are completely useless to their project.
These are often PRs modifying the documentation or the ReadMe, or correcting small typos, or adding useless comments like # AMAZING PROJECT! , so, yes, there is something to be upset about.
A quick reaction to limit spam
On the same day, the team of GitHub released a new moderation feature in the repo settings which allows you to limit contributions in three cases:
- prevent recent GitHub accounts from contributing (a lot of first-day spam comes from accounts created in the previous month)
- limit the modification to accounts that have already contributed to the project
- limit the modification to project contributors (who are managed in the settings)
And that for periods ranging from 24 hours to 6 months, including one month (handy for Hacktoberfest!)
In the hours after the complaints began, Digital Ocean also took new measures to limit spam. In previous years, they had already implemented PR invalidation if it was tagged as Spam or Invalid, thus preventing spammers from receiving their shirts. Maintainers can now report their repo as not participating in Hacktoberfest, they have more time to report PRs as spam, and users with PRs that are too often tagged as spam will also be banned from participating.
Edit of October 6
Digital changed the opt-out condition for maintainers to opt-in:
In short, measures are being taken to prevent TDD (T-shirt Driven Development).
That said, how do you contribute in a way Positive to open-source, if we've never done one and want to get started?
Reference sites to find projects
Several sites allow you to find projects that are looking for contributors:
- Awesome for Beginners List easy projects to contribute as beginners.
- Code sorting allows you to subscribe through your GitHub account to projects that interest and send emails regularly with issues from these projects in order to be able to participate. Anecdotally, codetriage is done in Ruby on Rails. 🎉
It is possible to search for issues on GitHub with tags like Good First Issues for issues especially for beginners. The site Good First Issue aggregates the most recent issues.
How to participate?
After finding a project you want to participate in, it's best to look in their ReadMe or if there is a file CONTRIBUTING.md to find out if there is a particular process to follow. The folders on Github have a section Issues that can be created by project developers as well as users who encounter difficulties. Generally (depends on the contribution guide!) It is better to indicate that you want to solve the issue, otherwise there may be several participants and useless contributions.After coding, you can open a PR referencing the issue that you want to solve.
If you have never done a PR, you can start with the online file First Contributions who will show you how to do it!
Happy Hacktoberfest (productive!)
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