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How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020 #Drama

UpdatedSeptember 29, 2025

•4 min read

Hacktoberfest

If you aren't familar, Hacktoberfest is an annual event that occurs every October. It is held by Digital Ocean and encourages developers to submit Pull Requests to Open Source repositories and as a reward you get a T-Shirt.

There's almost no limits, so if your request is merged into any Open Source repository, you qualify. Amazing.

The Fallout

Twitter starts going nuts. Not soon after October begins, we see many popular open source maintainers taking to Twitter complaining about low quality PRs bordering on SPAM.

https://twitter.com/traversymedia/status/1311751160517341192

https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311646233128181760

Some more honest than others

https://twitter.com/ilopmar/status/1311794527750049792

https://twitter.com/reinink/status/1311618846986469376

Even a Covid19Tracking Repo is under attack

https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311731378392768512

A whole new Twitter account @shitoberfest was created to track this

The Cause

This flood of low quality PR spam appears to come from a YouTuber with an audience of 672K where he demonstrates how easy it is to make a Pull Request to a repo.

Where he went wrong was demonstrating a low quality PR, thus setting the bar low for his viewers who went on to copy exactly what he did.

To avoid linking to his YouTube and giving him views, I'll link to this Twitter of the action moment:

https://twitter.com/joelnet/status/1311773094856454144

The Response

The response from CodeWithHarry was weak at best. It offered no apology and instead links to many instances where he avoids responsibility by linking to areas in the video where he encourages quality PRs.

A humble request to everyone to not open spam pull requests on GitHub repositories! Some people think that I am hurting the open source community. The purpose of this video was to encourage participation in the events encouraging open source participation and to teach people what a pull request is and how a pull request works! People understanding Hindi can watch the video but for people who are non Hindi speakers and for some reason think that I am requesting people to open spam pull requests, all I have told throughout the video is to make legit contributions to the open source. I have said nowhere in the video to open spam pull requests. I have made it clear in the video several times (for instance in the video at 00:55 - that you have to earn it by making contributions that count, 07:51 - Make legit contributions, 10:58, 11:10, etc). Also at 05:33 - I avoided an actively maintained project and instead opened pull request on a project which was not being maintained just to demonstrate how contributing to an open source repository actually works. I have not encouraged spam pull requests in bulk! I also agree with the fact that events like hacktoberfest can be made better by making only the legit merged pull requests count. But that has been a topic of debate since years when hacktoberfest was launched. I would also like to mention that many people opened their GitHub account, learned to make pull requests and made some amazing legit contributions to the open source too! I am proud of them and would like the entire developer community to act in a responsible manner.

Thanks, Harry 🙏

But this pinned comment is the least amount of effort he could have done to slow this shit storm.

How Do You Know CodeWithHarry Was Really The Cause?

Here's a screenshot of some pull requests from the repo micromtn.

Every request looks something like this:

This looks remarkably similar to the PR that was demonstrated in the video.

A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues.

A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues.

CodeWithHarry

CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him personally. After all, we're all human. With a following that big, he's definitely helped a lot of people. But he made a mistake here and he's going to have to be responsible for the outcome, which so far isn't looking great.

At the moment of this writing, his GitHub is 404. Was it taken down? Made private? Renamed?

It's only day 1.

Digital Ocean

Even Digital Ocean has chimed in on this fiasco.

We’ve traced the majority of this year’s spammy contributions back to a participant with a large online audience who openly encouraged their community to take part in spammy activities, including ideas on how to game the system.

Wait and See

So Lots of drama today. I guess all we can do is wait and see.

Hello HN 👋

This article hit #1 on HN. Go read the comments there for more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052

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Cheers 🍻

Update

Response from GitHub:

https://twitter.com/github/status/1311772722234560517

Response from Digital Ocean:

https://twitter.com/hacktoberfest/status/1312221208667185153

#programming

289K views

Comments (17)

Join the discussion

th3r00t5y ago

Its so much easier then all that... Create your own repo, and make 5 pull requests, then accept said requests. Youve got a free shirt, and didnt bother anyones repos.

Vatsal N5y ago

This is not TRUE, if you went on to watch the complete video (not available now), you would actually realize that he did not want people to spoil the open-source rather he wanted people to join and make Quality pull requests. He wanted to keep the video short and informative and hence he made such a P.R. (he also asks people to not to make FAKE P.R. and requests them to deliver quality content). It depends on the viewers whether they deliver right content or not. To be honest, I am 13 y/o and I did not know anything about Hacktoberfest. It was Harry's useful video which helped me to know about Hacktoberfest. I greatly thank Harry for the same. After knowing what Hacktoberfest is, I submitted 6 Pull Requests (not FAKE)

Anupama Dissanayake5y ago

this is some sort of a social engineering attack or something. I guess we should name this kind of attack "Expelliamus" since harry is the founder of it.

No5y ago

Majority of this spam has its roots in the land of the „highly skilled“😂

Peter Thaleikis5y ago

Really sad to see a well-intended program used to gain cheap advantages. A simple rule such as "resolving an GitHub-logged issue that existed prior to start of Hacktoberfest" would could help to address it.

Mohammed Ali Zubair5y ago

People saying it's not his fault, his viewers are stupid. Here's an idea, why not apply your logic to the 2016 american election. "It's not trump's fault he won, stupid people voted for him. It's THEIR fault" Yeah, the fact that he was able to garner an audience large enough to end up in that position is not to be blamed at all. Suuuuure.

Sean Ramey4y ago

Little late response, but, yeah it IS the American People's "fault". They voted him in. They DO have a choice. The fact that his audience was that big was because people supported what he was saying. And for the record, everybody that voted for him still absolutely support him.

Charles Brown5y ago

Next time take away the free crap and just have people do it to do it the shirt is something that you just happen to give to the winner, maybe.

Peos5y ago

Moral of the story: some people are immoral, yet we are forced to treat everyone equally. I don't blame digital ocean or any other around them for that. The self called "progressives" have low to zero perception of reality and they should be treated like every low IQ individual. It's OK, you did the best you can do.

Abhay Koradiya5y ago

only one fault he was made, He need to show a git links which is provided by #hecktoberfest on that site for making PR.

Skay5y ago

Thanks for sharing... Good to know how things spiraled out of control!

I generally stay out of controversial topics, but, even I had to say something about what's going on!!

https://twitter.com/hashnode/status/1311766563112927233?s=20

Having said that, to organize anything at a scale is a challenge, and 'Moderation' a key element in anything that's public and I hope this feedback can be taken up by the organizers and they can respond in a manner that's truly encouraging and keep the spammers at bay!!

Once again, thanks for sharing the post!

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