Spamtoberfest

Drew DeVault argues that Hacktoberfest 2020 has devolved into a spam campaign, with bots and low-effort contributors flooding open source maintainers with meaningless pull requests. Both DigitalOcean and GitHub deflect responsibility back onto maintainers to label and close spam PRs. DeVault contends Hacktoberfest has never genuinely benefited open source and exists purely as a marketing vehicle for DigitalOcean. He contrasts it unfavorably with programs like Google Summer of Code, which provide real mentorship. An update notes DigitalOcean changed their rules to require maintainer opt-in after the backlash.