Have you read the pull requests? I did and I'm appalled that someone would waste maintainers time like this. It's so pointless, and for what? A t-shirt?

15 spam PRs in last two hours https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website/pulls?q=is%3Apr

9 spam PRs in the last day https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+l...

Take a look at this user who has made 21 commits this year. 20 of the commits are from today and all of them are for valuable additions like:

* "made with love"

* "you will love it"

* " with "

* "Please do try we have made this for you"

* "That was amazing dud"

* "lovely i loved it"

* "and awesome"

* "and cool"

https://github.com/shibin37

EDIT: Formatting

Yea checking out the author seems to provide the needed understanding.

As completely unrelated, I would presume.

How then do you decide what is a PR just for the free shirt?

Your Linux-example a) is by a long-term contributor having a bit of fun and b) is better quality than many of the spam commits in that it actually makes things a miniscule amount better. IMHO, actual typofixes in the scope of Hacktoberfest are okay - they help a tiny bit and they don't hurt much. If someone learns how to make actual PRs through that, fine by me.

compare e.g. clear spam, which adds a copy of someones website into the HTML specification repo: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5972/files There is no scenario in which that is even a potential improvement.