Allow community marking of spam PRs
waldyrious opened this issue · comments
I've seen some people making spam PRs to repos that aren't very active, and where I have no write access, so the only thing I could do was to add a comment hoping the maintainer might take notice and mark the PR as invalid.
Considering that the rules say:
There's a seven-day review window for all pull requests before they count toward completing the challenge. [...] If the pull requests are not marked as invalid within that window, they will allow the user to complete the Hacktoberfest challenge.
...I would suggest there to be an alternative path for community members to somehow report such PRs, in case the maintainer doesn't react within those 7 days. Perhaps something as simple as introducing an "on-hold" status for PRs with comments containing a link to https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details#spam, or the expression "invalid label", or some other heuristic.
Not sure who would triage the PRs that end up in this list, which can be problematic if the rule is used maliciously — but considering the incentives at play (a free t-shirt, for those who submit spam PRs; vs. simply annoying people on the internet, for those who misreport spam), it may be reasonable to be a little conservative, even if a residual number of valid PRs end up unjustly ignored. After all, they may not yield a t-shirt, but if they're actually valid, they will eventually get merged, which after all is the real value we're looking for, right? 🙂
Unfortunately, I don't think us outsourcing moderation work to the community is really that viable.
However, we have taken some large steps to combat the spam seen this year, please do take a look at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update
Yeah, with the participation now being opt-in, this indeed becomes less needed. Thanks for the update!