Major League Hacking, DEV and DigitalOcean said Hacktoberfest 2026 will no longer count pull requests or merge requests toward rewards, citing maintainer feedback and low-effort, box-checking contributions that AI tooling has made cheaper to generate and harder to review. Participation now runs through 300-plus in-person Fests, online DEV Challenges, MLH livestreams and Global Hack Week, with virtual stickers replacing PR-based swag, and the organizers describe the month as a turn toward learning and building with open source and open-weight AI while treating maintainer attention as the scarce resource.
Hacktoberfest stops counting pull requests toward rewards after AI-driven spam
Major League Hacking, DEV and DigitalOcean said Hacktoberfest 2026 will no longer count pull requests or merge requests toward rewards, citing maintainer feedback and low-effort, box-checking contributions that AI tooling has made cheaper to generate and harder to review. Participation now runs through 300-plus in-person Fests, online DEV Challenges, MLH livestreams and Global Hack Week, with virtual stickers replacing PR-based swag, and the organizers describe the month as a turn toward learning and building with open source and open-weight AI while treating maintainer attention as the scarce resource.
Source: Mlh