Comment by jka
5 years ago
An important missing datapoint (as noted elsewhere on this thread) could be how many PRs were merged as a result of the 2019 Hacktoberfest; that'd help get a sense of the positive value contributed. I'm surprised it's not mentioned in the repository you link to.
Anecdotally, I'm getting a lot of obvious spam on my repos that are >4 years old and less spam on other repos. Also, my "org account" (from before orgs were a thing / fully featured) got more spam than my personal account (which I don't use often these days but does at least book a commit or two most months).
So, the spammers are probably intentionally targeting repos where folks aren't likely to bother marking as spam.
On a separate note, I do not understand why people care so much about mid-quality t-shirts...
> I do not understand why people care so much about mid-quality t-shirts...
Most likely a mix of "it's free", "it's easy", and "it looks nice on a CV". Perfect storm for a lot of students and juniors to spend an hour of their time on, without bothering to spend the extra two to actually make the contributions useful.
I found the T-Shirt really nice and comfortable. Sure, it's not the highest grade, but it's a damn nice thing to get for free!
Looks like that repo was made pretty much when the last hacktoberfest ended, which would be too early to tell IMO. But yes indeed, good datapoint to look at a year after (especially since PRs that take a longer time to merge are, I would think, likely to be higher quality PRs with a higher rate of dev conversion into contributor)
Ah, thanks, yep - that makes sense :)