I think it's mostly because DigitalOcean quickly changed the rules from 'any PR anywhere' to 'opt-in only' after one day of spam PRs all over the place.

There was one YouTuber in India that posted a tutorial on how to create a PR to win a free t-shirt. My guess is that the repo he featured in his video would have a much higher number of spam PRs.

Edit : That was discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052

Can you share how many spam PRs did you have? I thought to check here https://github.com/chartjs/Chart.js/pulls on my own but unfortunately you did not mark those with invalid or spam labels. For such a popular project like yours, did you get many? Was it overwhelming?

I'm really curious

I counted a total of 9. I went back and labelled them as spam. https://github.com/chartjs/Chart.js/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclo...

To be honest, I was expecting a lot worse. There were a few that we allowed in that were in a grey area though. 3 or 4 small PRs fixing typos in the docs that really should have been a single PR, but since it was actually improving things I let it slide.

Awesome, thanks for the numbers! I feel great reading what was your approach here. Thanks!