Hacktoberfest's spam fix moves the unpaid hours from PR reviewers to Fest organizers

The endpoint is the part you can test from a keyboard. The Fest-finder page tells scripts where to go in plain words, asking outright whether the reader is an LLM and directing it to pull every Fest from the API ^[8]. Send a bare request and it answers 403, because nothing set a User-Agent header; plain curl and Python's default urllib both get rejected ^[9]. Any string in that header gets you the JSON. An event that dropped its quota because generated submissions got cheap now publishes a machine-readable index and points LLMs at it, and the Fests themselves are organized around hands-on work with open-source AI and open-weight models ^[4].

The feed held 217 events worldwide on the day the dev.to author queried it ^[10]. The number that matters is the one for your own country. It transfers to your October only if one of the 217 sits within travel distance. The author's stake in the exercise was on the record: "I already own more Hacktoberfest shirts than occasions to wear them, so none of this was really about the cotton," the dev.to author wrote ^[13].

T-shirts exist only at in-person Fests, are not guaranteed there, and ship to organizers who hand them out at their own discretion based on on-site supply ^[6]. Online-only participants are not eligible for one ^[7]. A Fest runs 3 to 12 hours on a single day ^[4], so the longest window anyone has to qualify at a given Fest is 12 hours ^[14].

Major League Hacking and DEV run the 2026 event in partnership with DigitalOcean ^[3]. The FAQ's stated reason for the rebuild is that AI tools made low-effort pull requests trivial to generate at scale, and maintainers burned out reviewing the flood ^[2]. Attendance is harder to generate than a diff, so it works as a filter where a PR count stopped working. A Fest needs a venue, Wi-Fi and 3 to 12 hours from whoever hosts it, and hosting is open to anyone through the site ^[12]. For a city with nothing on the list, the site's answer is "that's your cue" ^[16].

The country filter, run across seven countries near Bulgaria, came back with nothing in Bulgaria, and the closest hits were the UK and Ankara, Turkey ^[11]. For a contributor in that slice, the routes to swag are travel to another country or the online Swag Envelope, whose participation milestones the FAQ has not published ^[5].