Require pull requests be accepted

[MattIPv4]

Description

To reduce drive-by spam and workload on maintainers to deal with spam, this makes it required that a pull request is merged or labelled as hacktoberfest-accepted to qualify. This should to an extent make Hacktoberfest opt-in for maintainers and should discourage users from making spammy PRs on legitimate projects as they won't count unless merged.

Test process

TBD.

Requirements to merge

• [x] My code follows the style guidelines of this project
• [x] I have performed a self-review of my own code
• [x] I have commented my code in hard-to-understand areas
• [ ] My changes generate no new warnings
• [ ] I have added tests that prove my fix is effective or that my feature works
• [ ] New and existing unit tests pass locally with my changes

[robbyoconnor]

I apologize if this is spammy but thank you for this.

[robbyoconnor]

One question: will this be applied retroactively?

[IsmaelMartinez]

I will go more for the approach of blocking people that is spamming PRs.

I think is great people just go and search around for small changes to be done, but I do agree that there is far too much spam and those people should be blocked/banned.

[Fabricio20]

I think it would be good to also allow the Hacktoberfest label to be used, which is more common and the recommended label to add in the HF's documentation for maintainers.

[IsmaelMartinez]

I agree the spam issue needs to be dealt, but the implications of those 2 changes are big.

If we only allow approved PRs that will encourage people to only do small fixes that doesn't take more than a couple of weeks to finish.

I have contributed to open source and, by nature, most of the time stuff takes quite a bit longer than a week.

On the other side, if we go down the "register" approach, we loose the side effects and limit a lot the contributions.

You can spend hours looking for a repo where to contribute as lost are either, in progress or require a lot of previous knowledge of the subject.

I personally think digital ocean should remove the freebies and that spam issue will mostly go away on its own. It's nice to get a t-shirt as recognition, but seems like is causing more problems than we hoped.

[robbyoconnor]

@IsmaelMartinez -- This happened with Google Code-in as well -- that contest was rewarding but holy moly did we get a lot of shit quality work -- We sat out last year and it's not running this year -- and I while sad, I'm just burned out from it. I met some incredibly talented kids but also some of the laziest and ethically questionable kids. Google Code-in was a contest for kids 13-17.

Maybe opt-in is the way to go and an easy reporting mechanism that doesn't cause burnout for maintainers. Like DO could very easily have detected these and banned all of the offenders.