First-contributions: Road Map for HacktoberFest 2018

[sara-02]

Last year we were one of the most visited repo. 8th most in terms of Highest Pull Request Count Repos

We have been receiving many PRs from newcomers and other contributors who added translations and fixed bugs and enhanced the documentation. With Hacktoberfest around the corner, let us work towards making first-contributions repo, even more successful.

🎯 Goal

• [x] Cleanup of old PRs that require an update from the contributor, but have not been addressed by them again.
• [x] Cleanup of issues that are no longer valid
• [x] Add newcomers issues(on what?)
• [x] Make sure that the PR-merge bot is working properly.

This is all I could currently think of, please add more ideas in the comments, and I will consolidate and update the issue from time to time.

[Roshanjossey]

Thank you for opening this issue @sara-02. 👍 🎉 I can't appreciate your thought process enough.

A note on PR-merge bot. It can work best if there are no merge conflicts. From our experience so far, most people add their names to the beginning or the end of Contributors.md. If we can make them add it at a random position, we can avoid a lot of merge conflicts.

[Roshanjossey]

From a marketing perspective, on thing that worked for us last time was to create easy issues when hacktoberfest began. Hacktoberfest site had a link that pointed to a GitHub search with hacktoberfest label. We were able to get traffic from that page.

[Roshanjossey]

It can work best if there are no merge conflicts. From our experience so far, most people add their names to the beginning or the end of Contributors.md. If we can make them add it at a random position, we can avoid a lot of merge conflicts.

I've made this change. It is working well now.

[sara-02]

@Roshanjossey you mean to say auto conflict resolving? :scream:

[Roshanjossey]

@sara-02, no, adding name at a random line number https://github.com/Roshanjossey/first-contributions/commit/3c24a99fbbb942251e965e5e34bb3c7d499bb700

If you take a look at the latest pull requests, most of them are added to random lines. This can result in least merge conflicts.

[Roshanjossey]

With regards to adding more beginner issues, I've created a list of items that can be converted as issues in a need to do basis.

Last year, there was a link from Hacktoberfest page to issues that have hacktoberfest tag. I'll try to create issues periodically so that our issues comes in the first pages of that list.

[razasayy]

It can work best if there are no merge conflicts. From our experience so far, most people add their names to the beginning or the end of Contributors.md. If we can make them add it at a random position, we can avoid a lot of merge conflicts.

I've made this change. It is working well now.

Is it alright if I modify the contributor's file and put an add nothing above and add nothing below Kind of thing so It's a bit more clear in case someone missed this info in the tutorial

[Roshanjossey]

@S-M-Jawwad-Raza, no, don't worry about it. Most people are adding their names to random places and our bot is working quite well.

[fahryseptian]

Yeah

[Roshanjossey]

It'd be awesome if someone help with putting First Contributions in opensource.guide. 💯

Check this for reference https://github.com/github/opensource.guide/pull/456

[Roshanjossey]

I'd published a post about how to use first contributions to get started with Hacktoberfest. We're getting some traffic from there https://medium.com/@roshanjossey/hacktoberfest-is-back-contribute-to-open-source-and-get-a-cool-t-shirt-11e50e89afd6

[lkreimann]

I tried my luck in the Github Opensoure Guide - hopefully they don't think I'm too involved or something like that, since I'm a member of the First Contributions organization

[Ifyokoh]

Do we just need to comment like @Ikreimann did on the opensource.guide issue?

[Roshanjossey]

@Ifyokoh, I'd suggest to open a new pull request. The one that I mentioned above doesn't have the correct link. Also, I'd think that a new issue will get more attention from maintainers than a comment on a closed issue.

[lkreimann]

Another idea to promote the repo: https://dev.to/ben/whos-looking-for-open-source-contributors-october-22nd-edition-44jb

[Roshanjossey]

@lkreimann, I've commented on some posts on dev.to to the point where the authors reported that as spam and dev.to warned me not to do that 😂 🤦‍♀️ .

Then again, I've ran in to problems like that in different places. Even in GitHub 😅

Are you active on dev.to? Their web app is also open source.

[Roshanjossey]

This is how we did in Hacktoberfest 2018

Thank you @sara-02 for starting this discussion so early so that we could plan and execute this so well.

I'd also like to thank everybody else in this thread and all who helped out during hacktoberfest.

Closing.