[gspr]

> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice.

I think this gives the spammers too easy an out.

They're adults who live in a society. They know full well that spamming is not OK, either offline or online. They also know that what they're doing is spamming, not accidentally overly fervent contributions.

Don't cut them any slack. This is pure and simple vandalism with a profit motive.

[amitheonlyone]

The thing is they may not. For all we know, they're hearing about pull requests the first time and just seeing the presenter showing how easy it is to do, by altering/adding a few words, and get a free t-shirt. I think the blame is all on the channel. The least he could've made a proper pull request by fixing an issue. That said, the blame should also go on DO since they could've made hacktoberfest opt-in. Instead they encourage PRs on any public repo.

[mcv]

Plenty of blame for both. The channel is appealing to people to spam crap PRs to inactive projects for the sole purpose of winning some swag, and his followers go spam projects for the sole purpose of winning swag.

One guy encourages people to be assholes, and the people respond by acting like assholes. Both leader and followers are wrong in this case.

[gspr]

Very good point. I certainly did not want to give the guy who encouraged them a break.

[raxxorrax]

You alone are not a spammer. You would need to anticipate the behavior of others. That there are 4 or 5 people on the internet is something that is slowly learned.

[saagarjha]

They live in a society that is not your society. I think it is entirely possible, and anecdotally even likely, that they do not realize what they are doing.