We know that many of you reading this article are very excited for Hacktoberfest and all the open source learning, community connection, and great prizes that come with it. We're right there with you!

At the same time, it's important to remember that Hacktoberfest is about quality > quantity. Low-effort and spammy PRs are frustrating for project maintainers and require them to spend their valuable time and energy marking the contributions as “invalid.” These types of contributions don’t benefit the projects, and they won’t even count towards the 4 PRs required to earn a prize. Let's work together as a community to benefit the open source ecosystem this month for everyone.

Here are some tips to ensure you have a productive and valuable Hacktoberfest experience:

Tip #1. Look for projects actively seeking Hacktoberfest contributions.

Pull-requests can be made in any participating GitHub-hosted repository/project. They will count toward your participation if they are in a repo with the hacktoberfest topic and once they have been merged, approved by a maintainer, or labeled as hacktoberfest-accepted.

However, maintainers can opt-in to participate by classifying their projects with the hacktoberfest topic (find a list of opted-in projects here). Referring to this list is a great way to connect with projects that are actively seeking Hacktoberfest contributions.

Regardless, you are not limited to this list. Any PR with the hacktoberfest-accepted label, submitted to any public GitHub repository, with or without the hacktoberfest topic, will be considered valid.

Tip #2. Question about a PR you'd like to make? Lean on the DEV community!

If you're a Hacktoberfest participant that's newer to making PRs or you'd just like a gut-check about your planned contribution, we highly encourage you to write down your thought process here on DEV in an article using the #help tag.

Project maintainers will appreciate the extra care before you submit a PR to their project. Remember, there are human beings with limited time doing the hard work of managing those repositories!

Tip #3. Quality contributions over quantity of PRs

Please take your time to make quality contributions and avoid rushing pull requests in an attempt just to hit the required number of PRs. For example, unnecessary or inappropriate documentation changes are some of the most disruptive contributions for maintainers.

Note that maintainers can invalidate low quality and spammy PRs. If they believe that a participant is contributing solely in an effort to hit the 4 PR goal, they will mark the contribution as invalid and it won’t be counted.

If a participant repeatedly violates these rules, they might be banned from Hacktoberfest for life! 😱

We truly wish everyone a very happy Hacktoberfest. Let's all be respectful of open source maintainers and the projects that they work so hard on. We can’t wait to follow your contributor journey!