It seems that the person responsible for the project proposed this to be opt-in [1], but it never got anywhere internally.

[1] https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311391325443555328

If they can't make it opt-in, at the very least they should:

1. Only count PRs that contain something like "#Hacktoberfest" in the GitHub comment accompanying the PR. This would make it easier for maintainers to weed out the spam or at least understand where it's coming from and what term to search for when they encounter this unprepared. Also, it would give "visibility" to the event, so it should even fly with management!

2. Only count merged PRs. Apparently DigitalOcean have a "reason" for not doing this, because some projects don't use the PR merging feature directly. I think they should reward users who educated themselves on this point and only opened PRs on projects that do merge them.

1. Should be the case for sure.

2. I think the other argument you could make against that is not everyone has the same time to merge. If it takes two weeks to get merged, I basically have to have the PR in by the second week of October.

DO could just check again for merged PRs whenever they want.

Why wouldn't they be able to make it opt in?

> I had a great experience with Hacktoberfest last year.

Yeah same here, but as a contributor. I decided I wanted to make my PRs count and decided on a targeted effort of taking one mans tiling WM for Windows[1] and fixing enough of the stability issues and race-conditions I found to the point where I should be able to use it myself.

Not a single one of those PRs was “cheap”, and the resulting improvements in quality and stability has lead that WM now to seemingly have more users and doing better than it used to.

Yeah I got a t-shirt. But I also got a tiling WM which is actually usable the times Im forced to use Windows too, which I kinda value more.

So clearly win win, as far as both I and that project-owner is concerned.

[1] https://github.com/rickbutton/workspacer