Comment by marcinzm
5 years ago
They literally checked for a label with text "invalid" and that's it. The OP, for example, used the label "spam" so it doesn't count. Simply closing the PR without merging or commenting doesn't count. Any other text label doesn't count.
So yeah, I suspect it's massively undercounting.
Their FAQ (linked from the submitted article) says:
>[...] 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.
Since project maintainers don't have to opt in to Hacktoberfest, there's no reason for them to know that the FAQ exists. Most maintainers are unaware of what's going on and will just close the spammy PRs without tagging them.
Oh yes, I wasn't disagreeing about that. I said as much in an older thread about another group of people attempting this same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968008
The code in the linked repo with the stats is literally:
>const totalInvalidLabelPRs = await db.collection('pull_requests').find({'labels.name': 'invalid'}).count();
They also mention the label "invalid" multiple times and never the label "spam." So even if they count "spam" for making entries invalid for a reward their stats do not seem to take that into account.
I believe this is a change between 2019 and 2020.
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It would seem like a much better idea to say that only PRs that are explicitly confirmed by the project maintainers as being valid will be counted.
Then you'll get people spamming maintainers to please hurry up and review/confirm their important PRs, and abuse if they don't.
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