[paxys]

As an open source maintainer, I'd gladly sift through a mountain of spammy PRs (heck closing 4 per hour, as called out in the article, is almost zero trouble), if it means even a handful of real significant progress and issues fixed and potential future maintainers.

[hcho3]

+1. I feel the same way. If one out of 20 drive-by contributors stick around and become regular, that would be a real win for me. (I'm currently maintaining a project with 20k GitHub stars and we have four regular contributors.)

[pseudalopex]

That's a big if.

[paxys]

Well this thing has been running for a few years now so I'm sure someone has that data

[mundo]

https://github.com/MattIPv4/hacktoberfest-data

[paxys]

A snapshot of one year's participation in that specific period isn't too relevant to what we are discussing, because it doesn't track sustained future contributions by those same users.

[justinclift]

That's a good point. Wonder if they're be open to adding something like that...?

Maybe suggest that in an issue on that stats tracking repo?

[gadgetoid]

In theory they are. In practise the lack of a test dataset - and the lack of access to their dataset - means it's virtually impossible for a third party to make any significant contribution to the data processing code.

Such an effort would have to start with them voluneering a test dataset and/or schema.

I have asked - https://github.com/MattIPv4/hacktoberfest-data/issues/5