The eighth annual Hacktoberfest is underway with a number of essential adjustments this yr. Hacktoberfest, a digital occasion sponsored by DigitalOcean and group companions, has historically inspired open supply contribution throughout the month of October by rewarding individuals with a t-shirt for submitting pull requests. The initiative has added assist for participation on GitLab this yr, a extremely requested enlargement that may embody extra open supply initiatives that aren’t hosted on GitHub.
Participation has grown from 676 individuals the primary yr to over 150,000 lately. In 2021, this system has been modified to be solely relevant to opt-in repositories after being linked to an inflow of spam for open supply maintainers in earlier years. Maintainers of common initiatives have been getting annoyed by losing their time dealing with nonsense PR’s and marking them as spam throughout Hacktoberfest.
Beginning this yr, pull requests will solely rely in direction of participation if they’re in a repository with the ‘hacktoberfest‘ matter and as soon as they’ve been merged and authorized by a maintainer or labeled as ‘hacktoberfest-accepted.’ Contributors should contribute 4 accepted PR’s to an opted-in repo with the intention to qualify for the free, limited-edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt.
“Maintainers are the spine of the open-source group and this yr, we’re targeted greater than ever on guaranteeing maintainers are receiving the love they deserve,” DigitalOcean Senior Group Relations Supervisor Phoebe Quincy stated. “Our maintainer-friendly guidelines embody permitting repos to opt-in to Hacktoberfest, guaranteeing solely accepted pull requests rely in direction of individuals’ Hacktoberfest objectives, and for the primary time ever, enabling maintainers to obtain a Hacktoberfest t-shirt with out having to submit pull requests.”
Open supply maintainers and contributors can be part of anytime throughout the month till October thirty first. If you happen to preserve a WordPress-related open supply undertaking, you possibly can get your undertaking prepared to obtain contributions by including the ‘Hacktoberfest’ matter to your repository, tagging points with the ‘Hacktoberfest’ label, and including a CONTRIBUTING.md file. Maintainers are additionally inspired to pick points which have a well-defined scope and are self-contained. Merging PR’s, including the ‘hacktoberfest-accepted’ label, and marking ‘invalid’ or ‘spam’ contributions will all rely in direction of engaged maintenership participation.