Hacktoberfest From the Maintainer's Side: Faster PR Closing

Description and use

Automation and policy changes during Hacktoberfest cut triage time by 60 % and reduced spam, speeding up review of genuine contributions.

During Hacktoberfest the repo received 380 PRs in three weeks, overwhelming maintainers and causing 60% triage time increase.

Automation and policy changes cut triage time by ~60 % and reduced spam, improving review speed for genuine contributors.

Create GitHub Action that runs on pull_request events
Compute diff stats (files changed, lines changed)
Detect trivial-only changes (no src/lib files touched)
Apply labels: low‑signal, large‑diff
Add bot checks: linked issue required, account age heuristic, duplicate good‑first‑issue detection
Close PRs with templated message if spam:likely or low‑signal without linked issue
Adjust repo Hacktoberfest topic to control spam influx

Last Hacktoberfest, our repo (a mid-sized CLI tool with about 4k stars) got hit with 380 pull requests in three weeks.

That second and third category is what pushed us to change our process mid-month.

We built a GitHub Action that runs on every pull_request event and does a first-pass triage before a human ever looks at it.

Median time-to-first-response dropped from 36 hours to 4 hours

We did get a handful of complaints about the terse closing message — a fair trade-off in our view