Inspired by you, the community, through your actions and stories.
We ask all participants to read through the details to ensure that the global community is working toward a shared goal. Thank you for honoring the values and following the rules of participation.
To get a prize, you must make four eligible pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31 in any time zone.
Pull requests prior to the rule change on October 3, 2020 at 12:00:00 UTC can be to any public repository on GitHub, not just the ones highlighted.
Pull requests following the rule change must be to a participating public repository on GitHub, and have been merged, labelled as hacktoberfest-accepted, or approved.
Pull requests labelled as hacktoberfest-accepted will count toward to Hacktoberfest from any public repository on GitHub, with or without the hacktoberfest topic.
The pull request must contain commits you made yourself. If a maintainer reports your pull request as spam, it will not be counted toward your participation in Hacktoberfest. If a maintainer reports behavior that’s not in line with the values of Hacktoberfest or the project’s code of conduct, you will be ineligible to participate. This year, the first 70,000 participants can earn a T-shirt or plant a tree.
To put the rules in a form consistent with the spirit of Hacktoberfest:
In line with Hacktoberfest value #2 (Quantity is fun, quality is key), we have provided examples of pull requests that we consider to be low-quality contributions (which we discourage).
Last but not least, one pull request to fix a typo is fine, but 4 pull requests to remove a stray whitespace is not.
Spammy pull requests can be given a label that contains the word "invalid" or "spam" to discount them. Maintainers are faced with the majority of spam that occurs during Hacktoberfest, and we dislike spam just as much as you. If you're a maintainer, please label any spammy pull requests submitted to the repositories you maintain as "invalid" or "spam", and close them. Pull requests with this label won't count toward Hacktoberfest.
There's a fourteen-day review window for all pull requests before they count toward completing the challenge. Once a participant has submitted four eligible pull requests (ready-to-review, not drafts), the review window begins. This period gives maintainers time to identify and label spammy pull requests as invalid. If the pull requests are not marked as invalid within that window, they will allow the user to complete the Hacktoberfest challenge. If any of the pull requests are labeled as invalid, the user will return to the pending state until they have four eligible pull requests, at which point the review period will start again.
Bad repositories will be excluded. In the past, we've seen many repositories that encourage participants to make simple pull requests – such as adding their name to a file – to quickly gain a pull request toward completing Hacktoberfest. While this may be a learning tool for new contributors, it goes against one of our core values for Hacktoberfest. The quality of pull requests is paramount; quantity comes second. These repositories do not encourage quality contributions and provide an unfair advantage in completing the Hacktoberfest challenge. We've implemented a system to block these repositories, and any pull requests submitted to such repositories will not be counted.