Fwd: Hacktoberfest related spam

[Justin Obara]

Hi everyone,

Simon wrote up a detailed post about Hacktoberfest and dealing with related spam PRs. Please see below:

Thanks
Justin

> 
> Today is the start of October and the start of DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest program.
> 
> The Inclusive Cities website repository has received its first spam pull request (https://github.com/inclusive-design/website-cities/pull/51/files). It's likely that other projects will also see spam PRs, particularly website repositories (CSS files seem to be a popular target).
> 
> In this email, I've written up a little about Hacktoberfest and how to report spam pull requests.
> 
> What is Hacktoberfest?
> 
> - https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/
> - DigitalOcean will send participants a t-shirt for making 4 pull requests against any GitHub repository during the month of October
> 
> Spam
> 
> - The intention of the program is to promote contributions to open source projects by offering a reward for making contributions
> - Unfortunately, it is easy to attempt to game the program by making pull requests with insignificant changes as a PR does not have to be accepted to qualify, only that it be made
> - Example spam PRs made against the WHATWG HTML spec working group website repo: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+label%3Aspam
> 
> How to report spam
> 
> - From the Hacktoberfest FAQ:
> 
> "As a maintainer, how should I handle spam pull requests?
> 
> We dislike seeing spam pull requests just as much as you, so please give them an 'invalid' or 'spam' label and close them. Pull requests that contain a label with the word 'invalid' or 'spam' won’t be counted toward Hacktoberfest."
> 
> https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq
> 
> Simon
> 
> --
> Simon Bates
> Senior Inclusive Developer
> Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
> https://idrc.ocadu.ca
>