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Discussion on: DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source

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ender_minyard profile image
ender minyard • Edited

Genuine question: How can beginners help maintainers?

I made a repo specifically for Hacktoberfest and the most basic issues were completed poorly or not at all. Someone tried to get a pull request by adding spaces to the README, then adding a reaction gif once I caught on.

I removed beginner-friendly from my repo tags and no longer tag the issues with Hacktoberfest.

I don't think Hacktoberfest shouldn't exist, but I'm trying to find out if it helps anyone besides the people getting a free T-shirt.

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cipharius profile image
Valts Liepiņš • Edited

It would be interesting to find out some useful/spam ratio.

Personally, in the last two Hacktoberfest events I focused on resolving existing issues in projects, instead of doing cosmetic fixes. Perhaps it should be a requirement for the PRs to solve actual issues.

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ender_minyard profile image
ender minyard

Are beginners capable of resolving existing issues?

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cipharius profile image
Valts Liepiņš

The event is not beginners exclusive, although one of it's goals is to introduce new coders to collaboration on open source projects.

I think it's possible to find such issues, which matches the person's skill level, despite being new to coding. Or even if the person can not code yet, often projects have issues for either writing documentation or expanding translations.

I remain optimistic and believe that with appropriate briefing, even beginners can contribute meaningful content.