Let's Play *Why Is My Repo EXCLUDED? <rant>
Published: 2023-10-11 05:10:44

I was so excited about Hacktoberfest this year because last year I was one PR away from completing and it ruined my streak. This year I decided to not only participate as a coder but to host a repository.

Let me preface this by saying, I'm NOT a great coder. I'm an undergraduate Computer Science student who is mostly self-taught. I work at the college I go to part time as a Digital Student Liaison. So I help students and teachers with things among which are creating their own online portfolio. We use something similar to Jeckyll. In that, while I teach them, they also come to learn some HTML/CSS/JS — You know, to make their webpage look cool. These folks don't need to learn MERN or Wordpress. They need to learn to my H1, H2, H3.

On a tangent- I know... So last year, my team and I won the hackathon at school. I was the person who coded the site and we deployed a simple social network for the school. As a result, I'm volunteering for the board to help organize this year's hackathon.

I promise, this all ties together. Before this event, we usually do peer organized little mini-hackathons and I teach folks through things like hour of code and freecodecamp.

So I would excited to host a repository this year and I got dozens of people to sign up for hacktoberfest! YAY! 

My repository has even gotten 19 stars! WOO!

So I opened this repository up for hacktoberfest and many strangers came, and many friends and fellow students. It's been great. A big mess really, as I've had to git revert --no-commit twice already lol.

I'm still learning too. Big time.

What I didn't expect was someone coming back to me saying their PR was excluded. Upon investigation, I've confirmed at least 2. I'm not sure if it's just the PR or the whole repo. I've gotten no communication about this. No flags. No way to know but the hard way. Wow. Imagine all the people who are excluded who don't know and how many people are participating in good faith highly motivated by the hacktoberfest only to be dropped the bomb that they are rejected, excluded, and invalidated.

I for one feel highly embarrassed and humiliated for hyping this up to over 50 people and signing people up and being a whole cheerleader, only look like a fool who wasted everyone's time.

For new people- this is their first impression.

I realize hacktoberfest has a spam problem.
I realize it also has a problem with vulture repos.
What is hilarious is, the prizes are 100% digital anyway.
And they're coupon codes we get when we sign up anyway.
In reality, these badges lend nothing to our resume.
Nobody says, "They completed hacktoberfest- let's hire her."
Promotional.
And that's fine. I want them digital rewards too. Hey!
But, the move to flag first ask questions never— is highly discriminatory against basic web developers and small repos.

Back to my story... So, I wanted to teach people about opensource and I still will (this is not open source's fault) via this event and I thought it would be great. I was teaching people basic code, right in the real life using real Git. Hands on.

So I emailed hacktoberfest-at-digitalocean.com and got the "ticket number" automated response...

We will see how it goes.

Sincerely, disheartened.

Here is my repo https://github.com/omicreativedev/ThemeSwitcher

I know it's simple but it was fun.