Persuade PRs to be code form by distributing the spam

[Andrew Chen Wang]

Feature description

TL;DR Show only small repos when people search Hacktoberfest since when a person simply searches hacktoberfest on GitHub, it's just repos with hacktoberfest.

Ref: #596 (This is just a copy of my comment). I'm mostly for this PR, but (the following is my proposal to distribute the spamming of PRs to become small PRs but in "actual code form" to smaller repos):

I have an organization's repo with only 5 stars in it, and I'd love to see contributions to it. I think we just need to think back to what this entire event is for: encouraging people to contribute to open source. Right now, I think this PR 1. makes large repositories overrun with spam and 2. make smaller repositories who desperately need contributions left in the dust that is GitHub's tag search engine (which is great, but not for this event since the repos that just accept random hacktoberfest-targeted PRs get more "contributions").

Solutions via rules and code:

1. Some new rules that can be made in place is for repositories with greater than 2,000 stars to only accepts PRs from GitHub users who have created at least 100 contributions with an account age over 2 months. In my opinion, most people (but not all e.g. I joined with programming knowledge and immediately contributed to a large repo) with the aforementioned criteria create meaningful PRs in those repositories.
2. What about those smaller repositories? The ones with less than 2,000 stars? In my opinion, they need contributions from newcomers to git and/or programming in general. They need small PRs to catch edge cases or small new features as the repo is growing. Those are where most PRs should be geared towards since the larger ones already have a huge backing of PRs. "This sounds like the event is for open source rather than for introducing devs to open source?" To me, yes I agree, but also note that that way we can distribute the spam -- in a sense -- and the people are more encouraged to spam with small CODE changes not doc changes.

Code changes:

1. I believe the way we can help with an endeavor to persuade spamming meaningful PRs to small repositories would be to offer a survey. See which programming languages people are most familiar with, and show them repositories based on the above criteria.
2. Currently, the GitHub search engine on searching "hacktoberfest" shows only repos that say hacktoberfest. What do you think will happen? Additionally, the GitHub search engine can provide easier methods for searching repositories by finding hacktoberfest-labeled small repos that have recently been updated in the last 2 months. Order them based on the fuzzy searching of GitHub's search engine (per usual) and number of commits and currently open PRs. (I'm not entirely sure about the ordering, and obviously messing with the ordering at this point in time is difficult).
3. If too many commits are going to a single repo, raise an alert and check it (don't internally mark it as spam yet, but show an alert on GitHub saying this may be marked for spam iff a HUGE and I mean HUGE rate limit is reached). That's all I can say about this since I'm not sure what the database is like for this.

Idk, in essence, I think there would be more good to this event if small repositories got more PRs to 1. distribute the spam, 2. make sure PRs are in "actual code form," and 3. help the smaller repositories grow. That way, we can also deter any repositories that are only for "hacktoberfest" itself so people can win a free prize.

Disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist and I can't predict the future, but I'd love to see some kind of discussion.

[Andrew Chen Wang]

Just another thing about the search engine, in inspiration from I believe Mark Rober on eBay buying baseball cards that are misspelled, use some kind of formula like Levenshtein to make sure that the user who is searching "hacktoberfest" in GitHub get the results we want them to see.

Since GitHub is probably not going to see this or change their search engine, I think your website can do the same kind of searching ref the GH API. How can I contribute? Uh I can't; I got midterms in four days lol.

[Andrew Chen Wang]

Nevermind I'm closing this after seeing this repository get flurried: https://github.com/xraymemory/micromtn

May OG contributors and maintainers RIP.