Learnings and ideas from this years Hacktoberfest

[gr2m]

During a Helpdesk session with raise.dev (https://www.twitch.tv/raisedevs), I showed off the first-times app as one way I use automation to help me maintain Open Source project. I've written a little script which created 24 hacktoberfest issues for first time contributors.

Instead of accepting one pull request per person, I invited as many people as were interested to send a pull request. Today I merged all the pull request using a separate commit and Co-authored-by, (example commit).

I wrote a 2nd script which goes through all open hacktoberfest issues, finds all linked pull requests, derives the authors, creates the commit, and adds comments to both accepted PR and PRs that had changes requested but the author did not get back to me.

The 2nd script could be implemented in the first-timers app itself. I'm not yet sure what the trigger might be. Ideas:

• a comment from one of the maintainers, such as @first-timers merge
• and issue reached the limit of 10 assignees
• An timeout such as 3 days after the first pull request was accepted
• Each time a review is added to a pull request that is liked to a first-timers-only issue, the app could check the status of the issue. If a pre-defined time has passed (e.g. 3 days), and all linked pull requests are accepted, they will be merged automatically