Are there anti-cheating measures in place?

[TechnologyClassroom]

What would prevent people from automating junk contributions from two accounts to game the system?

Example: Account A makes junk repositories and rewards maximum points. Account B makes junk pull requests and asks for points.

Not sure if you've been following Hacktoberfest, but many junk repositories have been created to facilitate junk pull requests. Common examples of this are add-your-name-to-this-page sort of repositories. The low-effort contributions took advantage of the physical T-Shirt mailing program.

[frol]

@TechnologyClassroom Great topic to discuss! Let me be honest, this is a good problem to have (we are not at that scale yet). We keep track of all the PRs and authors, and currently, we have a manual process to watch out for. We followed the Hacktoberfest drama and kept the balance here.

For the examples you provided, we will manually ban those bad repos and authors at this stage.

For the case of Hacktoberfest with the storm of spammy PRs, we hope that we don't create any incentives for the actors since we ask the maintainers to score, and these spam PRs will get a 0 score out of it, and knowing that I hope they won't even try to create those PRs in the first place.

As a small Race-of-Sloths team, we are happy to discuss this topic in depth with the community and find the best solution. Do you have specific proposals? Would you like us to schedule a public call to discuss it? (happy to)

[TechnologyClassroom]

Manual moderation does work at a small scale. This is something to brainstorm if the labor of moderation becomes too great.

I do not have a solution and I do not want to call. This is the first thought that I had when I saw your project. How would they prevent abuse? Would this create more noise than productivity?

[frol]

@TechnologyClassroom Thank you for your interest in our project. We are looking forward to seeing you give it a try and join our community or bring your friends to play it.

Would this create more noise than productivity?

In my experience, it does not affect productivity and helps with burnout a bit.