Comment by rob74
5 years ago
I think they should completely reverse their approach: instead of instigating people to create senseless PRs, DigitalOcean should use the GitHub API to find contributors who made meaningful first contributions to existing projects over the last year, and send them T-shirts... in October?
I think a major part of this is about pushing devs who haven't contributed before to contribute such as new cs students.
That may be the intention, but what's happening is basically vandalism: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=is%3Apr+%22improve+docs%2...
~1000 single line/word pull requests in the last 3 hours, almost all worthless rubbish. The scale of the problem is pretty severe.
To pick a single example: https://github.com/Geng-WD/websiteTest
A little personal Java project, unchanged in 3 years, where a new "contributor" has submitted a pull request where they add a comment with their own name in one commit, and then remove it and replace it with "Awesome coding website" in a second commit. 19 hours earlier another new "contributor" submitted a pull request to add a completely irrelevant mock gym web page (and they've done the same thing to a bunch of other randomly chosen repos).
If these people had to demonstrate valuable contributions over a longer span of time, I don't think any of this nonsense would be happening. There's no reason new CS students can't be respectful and put a little effort into doing something worthwhile, and they'll learn a lot more than from this mindless spamming.
After looking at a few dozen accounts and their PR histories, the spammers seem to be just searching for repositories that have the word "website" in their description and picking a random set of 5 to send random requests to.
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That would mean DigitalOcean has to do work. It's probably easier for them if the open source maintainers have to do the work.
but this would take time and imagination and is so much harder.