Participation

Maintainers: label spammy requests “spam” and close them. PR/MRs labeled “spam” won’t count toward Hacktoberfest. Contributors with 2+ spammy PR/MRs are disqualified.

Maintainers accept PR/MRs by merging them, labeling them “hacktoberfest-accepted,” or giving them an overall approving review. Accepted PR/MRs enter a seven day review window, during which approval can be revoked by the maintainer or by our team.

PR/MRs should be useful to maintainers and be meaningful contributions to open-source software. Repositories that are created specifically for Hacktoberfest that do not benefit the wider open-source community, or repositories that encourage overly simplistic and inconsequential contributions such as adding a name or profile to a list or adding random content to a repo such as algorithms, will be excluded from Hacktoberfest. Remember: quantity is fun, quality is key.

Found a repository that you think doesn’t follow our values? Report it to us and we’ll take a look.

Hacktoberfest is about contributing meaningfully to open-source projects. Here are some examples of low-quality pull/merge requests that won’t count towards Hacktoberfest.

• Automated pull/merge requests: scripted opening pull requests to remove whitespace, fix typos or optimize images.
• Disruptive pull/merge requests: taking someone else’s branch/commits and making a pull request.
• Anything that a project maintainer flags as spam.
• Anything that looks like an attempt to duplicate your pull request count for October.
• Multiple pull/merge requests for the same issue that are unnecessary, for example four PR/MRs to remove a stray whitespace.

Aside from the knowledge you’ll gain, (and the fun you’ll have) you’ll get a digital badge through Holopin to represent your participation in Hacktoberfest. As each of your four pull/merge requests is accepted by a maintainer, you’ll unlock a new level in your badge, letting you customize it and showing to the community your achievement.

You will receive a notification in your Hacktoberfest profile on the Hacktoberfest website. Additionally, you will receive an email from Holopin to claim each level of your badge.

Hacktoberfest profiles close on December 15. Please make sure you’ve claimed all your Holopin badges using the claim links on your profile (also sent via email).

As Hacktoberfest has grown, so have the logistical challenges associated with creating a reward. Unfortunately, it’s no longer feasible for us to provide a free t-shirt. Nevertheless, we still want participants to have a memorable experience and receive a special memento marking their participation and the year. Instead of a t-shirt reward, we’re partnering with Holopin to provide a digital badge to each participant, making global delivery much simpler. We believe this shift will allow Hacktoberfest to continue supporting and raising awareness for open-source projects worldwide for years to come.

Yes, all pull/merge requests created between October 1 and October 31 will count, regardless of when you register for Hacktoberfest.

Yes, but we strongly encourage you to make quality contributions to other repositories.

Yes, each pull/merge request will count separately.

No, only pull/merge requests count.

No, pull/merge requests for Hacktoberfest do not need to be attached to a hacktoberfest issue.

Pull/merge requests must be made on either the GitHub or GitLab platform.

You can politely request that the maintainer of the project you contributed to tag your contribution with the label hacktoberfest-accepted . Or, add the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to the repository to opt the project into Hacktoberfest.

Any pull/merge request with the hacktoberfest-accepted label, submitted to any public GitHub/GitLab repository, with or without the hacktoberfest topic, will be considered valid for Hacktoberfest.

Please visit the Hacktoberfest Events page to learn how to host and register a Hacktoberfest event.

Yes! We’ll use the information you provide when registering your event on the Hacktoberfest Events page to publish your event to Major League Hacking for anyone to attend.

Events are a great way to increase awareness of open source in your community, giving community members an opportunity to meet maintainers, contributors, and each other.

Events provide opportunities to learn about the open-source ecosystem—from how to start an open-source project to marketing your project, sustaining growth, and troubleshooting and maintenance.

Anyone can organize an event as long as you celebrate open source during the event. Find out more about how to host and register your event on the Hacktoberfest Events page.

Whether you’re meeting virtually or in person, meetups can be challenging to facilitate, but they can still be fun! Using networking tools like Icebreaker or Kahoot for a trivia game and asking fun opener questions (such as two truths and a lie) can loosen up the crowd and get attendees ready to share their open-source knowledge.

Yes! We encourage all kinds of events - whether they are virtual, in-person or a hybrid.

If you do want to hold an in-person event, there are a few things to note:

• We will not be providing swag or event kits for in-person events held this year. Do, however, check out our Brand Kit which includes some virtual swag such as mobile or desktop wallpapers and a Git Cheat Sheet.

• Please follow the advisory guidelines of your state and local governments about gatherings in person.

Once you have submitted an event, the Major League Hacking events team will review your listing within 1-2 business days. If any changes need to be made, you will be alerted and the review process will start over. Please note: if you submit your event within two days of the event start and that coincides with a weekend, we cannot guarantee that the event will be approved in time.

For Hacktoberfest, pull/merge requests on GitHub/GitLab will not be counted until they are marked as ready for review: Those marked as draft will not be counted.

Please make sure to mark any draft pull requests as ready for review so that project maintainers can merge them.

In an effort to reduce spam and help maintainers, all pull/merge requests go through a week-long approval period for Hacktoberfest. This provides a buffer window for maintainers where they can change their decision on a pull/merge request that they may have accepted, and gives our team time to review and tackle spam across the whole program. No action should be required by you, your pull/merge request will automatically count toward your Hacktoberfest progress once the seven days elapse, as long as it is still accepted by the project maintainers and follows Hacktoberfest’s rules.

If a maintainer labels your pull/merge request as invalid or spam, but you don’t believe this is correct, please begin a conversation with the maintainer of the PR and respectfully explain your position. Understand that it is ultimately up to the maintainer whether or not they think your PR/MR is legitimate, and you should respect their decision after discussing it with them.

No. All pull/merge requests made before the start of Hacktoberfest, September 30 at 10:00 AM UTC, will not count.

We continually check the validity of your pull/merge requests, so as soon as a maintainer opts-in the project, we’ll see this has happened and start processing your pull/merge request fully. Once we’ve seen that your PR/MR is in an opted-in project, we won’t check this again, so don’t worry if a maintainer later removes the topic again, your PR/MR will still count.

Hacktoberfest refreshes user profiles automatically in the background every six hours, fetching the latest data for all your pull/merge requests and processing them to ensure they’re in the correct state, before then processing your account itself to ensure you’re in the correct state and have the correct rewards.

When you load your Hacktoberfest profile, we’ll also attempt to refresh your profile in the background, at a maximum rate of once every 15 minutes. Once you’ve loaded your profile to trigger this background processing, you may need to reload your profile again after a few minutes to see the updated data.

If you make changes to a PR/MR that will affect its standing for Hacktoberfest in the final six hours of the event, you will need to load your profile and ensure the changes are reflected there, as there will be no further automatic background jobs to catch the changes.

Due to limitations in how GitHub handles SSO-protected organizations, even if a repository is public, accessing it requires a valid SSO session if you are a member of the organization. This same restriction extends to OAuth applications, such as Hacktoberfest, so we cannot automatically fetch SSO-protected contributions for you if you do not have an active SSO session.

To ensure that your contributions to public repositories in an SSO-protected organization that you are a member of are tracked for Hacktoberfest, first ensure that you are signed into GitHub and have an active SSO session for the organization, such that you can access the PR/MR yourself. With the active SSO session in GitHub, load your Hacktoberfest profile to trigger a background refresh of your profile, which should allow us (via our OAuth app) to fetch the latest data for the PR/MRs.

First, classify your repository with the hacktoberfest topic. This will let participants know that your repo is participating in Hacktoberfest. Check out this video on how to apply the hacktoberfest topic to your repository.

You can also create issues for anything you’d like contributors to help with, and you can add labels like good first issue and help wanted so they’re easier to discover.

We dislike seeing spam pull/merge requests just as much as you, so please give them a spam label and close them. Pull/merge requests that have a label containing the word spam won’t be counted toward Hacktoberfest, and participants with two or more PR/MRs identified as spam will be disqualified.

Whether you are a maintainer, contributor or event organizer, you are eligible to unlock the digital badges as your four pull/merge requests are accepted. Unfortunately, we won’t be rewarding maintainers for completing maintainer actions such as reviewing pull/merge requests this year, only for submitted accepted PR/MRs.

Hacktoberfest is an opt-in system for maintainers. Repositories must have the hacktoberfest topic to opt-in and have PR/MRs be counted, or individual PR/MRs can be labeled with the hacktoberfest-accepted label. Any repository without the hacktoberfest topic, and not using the label, is automatically excluded, no action required.