Comment by chrisallenlane

Perhaps this would align everyone's incentives:

- Only honor PRs against repositories that have opted-in

- Only allow repositories that meet certain "notability" criteria to opt-in (to prevent the creation of "fake" repositories)

- Only honor PRs that are merged within a specified time-period

- If DO has the resources, volunteer some folks to filter/close spammy PRs on the participating repos

I maintain several open-source projects, and the spam would annoy me. That said, if the constraints above were applied to Hacktoberfest, I would opt-in my own projects. I think these constraints would do a reasonable job of disincentivizing people opening spammy PRs (because I simply wouldn't merge them), while bringing my projects to the attention of developers that are looking to make a contribution to open-source in good faith.