What to do about old Hacktoberfest PRs?

[tianyizheng02]

@cclauss Re: this point from your recent comment:

I could really use your help as a maintainer to clean up our pull requests ahead of Octoberfest [sic].

Given that a large portion (if not a large majority) of open PRs are from past Hacktoberfests, handling those PRs is the most effective way to massively reduce our backlog. However, most of those PRs have some problem or another that prevent us from merging them as is (no type hints, improper formatting, failing doctests, no doctests, etc). My worry is that these problems will never be resolved and reviewing these PRs would be a waste of time. Given that these PRs were (presumably) made mainly to reach the Hacktoberfest PR quota, I doubt that most if any of the PRs' authors care enough to revise a one- or two-year-old PR of theirs from an event that has long since concluded—that is, if they see our reviews at all.

With this in mind, what do you (or anyone else) think is the best way to handle these old Hacktoberfest PRs? Should we fix them ourselves and merge what we can? Or should we just close these PRs since most of them are lost causes anyway? On one hand, I don't like the former because it might set an undesirable precedent of contributors expecting us maintainers to fix their code for them. On the other hand, I don't like the latter either because it rejects many legitimate algorithm contributions, and merging them makes our jobs easier if/when future contributors try to contribute the same algorithms.

[cclauss]

I think we need to close those PRs that have little value or would require more work than it is worth to merge. We must always be courteous to our contributors -- "Thank you for your contribution but...", "Can you please try to rebase your pull request to our current master branch" -- but we need to close all open PRs before October 1st. If you see PRs that cannot be rehabilitated, please close them with a courteous message.

Based on past experience, I think that we should autoclose all new pull requests that are opened in the week between September 24th and October 1st so that we start Hacktoberfest with a clean slate. Are there ways that we should improve our contribution process or continuous integration tests to keep our code quality as high as possible? We have earned more than 161K GitHub Stars by being a welcoming learning community that maintains high-quality algorithms. Let's keep up that great tradition.

@TheAlgorithms/python_maintainers

[tianyizheng02]

Perhaps something like

Thank you for your contribution, but unfortunately we're not accepting new PRs at the moment. We're currently trying to clear our backlog of existing PRs in preparation for Hacktoberfest. If you want to contribute, please wait until after October 1 to do so.

[cclauss]

This is great! There are currently 80+ open pull requests. Please close them before October 1st starts.

This ONLY applies to the Python repo. Other repos remain open to new pull requests.

Once Hacktoberfest starts, let’s keep our standards high. All pull requests require tests, type hints, good variable and function names, etc. Our code quality has helped our repo to achieve 170k GitHub ⭐️ so it is vital that we retain the high quality that visitors expect.

If submissions do not meet our well documented standards then add a link to CONTRIBUTING.md and close them. Let’s also make sure that contributions are algorithms as defined in CONTRIBUTING.md and not how-to-use examples (except in web programming). Please make sure that all messages courteous with please and thank you, etc. because we want to continue to encourage quality contributions from a broad audience.

We must try to keep the number of open PRs low as we proceed thru the busy month ahead.

[tianyizheng02]

By the way, I just found out that this year Hacktoberfest won't be providing free t-shirts. I don't know about you all, but I feel that the free t-shirts were a large incentive for people to participate. Maybe this means the influx of Hacktoberfest PRs will be less extreme this year?

[rohan472000]

But still digital reward and plantation on contributor name , these 2 incentives are there.

[cclauss]

I am OK with not getting the contributions from folks who only wanted a tee-shirt.
They usually want to fix typos (we have codespell for that) or change code formatting (we have psf/black for that).

[cclauss]

It is October 1st in Kiribati so I have closed the 50 remaining open PRs and Hacktoberfest 2023 can officially begin...