It’s Hacktoberfest again, but you don’t know where to find interesting projects? This CLI will help you find participating projects based on your starred repositories. Simply run:

npx hacktoberfest-hunt

The Hacktoberfest team has responded to the concerns of Hacktoberfest hurting open source, saying…

We apologize for the impact this spam is having on the community. We often talk about intent versus impact and this is a classic example. Hacktoberfest aims to celebrate open source with positive engagement between contributors and maintainers alike. Unfortunately, the actions of some participants led to unintended consequences for all. They’ve overwhelmed maintainers and steamrolled other participants in an effort to receive a T-shirt they didn’t really earn.

Despite this, we are confident that, with your help, we can make things better. We’ve already started making changes to the program to help reduce spam and there is much more work planned in the days ahead.

And specifically to maintainers…

We’re sorry that these unintended consequences of Hacktoberfest have made more work for many of you. We know there is more work to do, which is why we ask that you please join us for a community roundtable discussion where we promise to listen and take actions based on your ideas.

We’re big fans of what Hacktoberfest represents, but maybe it’s time to rethink the model. The burden falls primarily on maintainers, as Domenic Denicola outlines in this post – going as far as to describe Hacktoberfest as “a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community.”

For the last couple of years, DigitalOcean has run Hacktoberfest, which purports to “support open source” by giving free t-shirts to people who send pull requests to open source repositories.

In reality, Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community.

So far today, on a single repository, myself and fellow maintainers have closed 11 spam pull requests. Each of these generates notifications, often email, to the 485 watchers of the repository. And each of them requires maintainer time to visit the pull request page, evaluate its spamminess, close it, tag it as spam, lock the thread to prevent further spam comments, and then report the spammer to GitHub in the hopes of stopping their time-wasting rampage. … The rate of spam pull requests is, at this time, around four per hour. And it’s not even October yet in my timezone.

This screenshot of issues on whatwg/html labeled as spam was taken moments before posting this.

#Hacktoberfest is a once per year event in the month of October celebrating open source. For many it’s an on ramp to open source, PRs galore for maintainers, and t-shirts for those who submit 5 or more pull requests. In the end, however, it’s about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good to humanity as we know it.

Adam and Jerod talk with Daniel Zaltsman, Dev Rel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude, and of course we cover how you can play your part in #Hacktoberfest and give back to open source.

Hacktoberfest is here once again, and we devs will do just about anything for a free shirt.

However, there’s a war inside us. The Acquire Free Swag inclination is at odds with the Be Super Lazy inclination, leaving many wondering… “What’s the absolute easiest route to that sweet, sweet swag?!”