The Github Follower Problem

For me the problem is that a "bookmark" function is missing. I usually follow interesting projects so that I'm able to find them later on. For most of those projects I'm not interested in the commits, I'd just like to have a link to them somewhere in my GitHub account.

This is why I built "GitHub Feed Filter" - a Google Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdg...). It adds an interface in the page that enables users to look at feeds filtered by projects, by commits, by issues and by comments.

The problem with the news feed is it assumes I want the same level of engagement with every project I follow. On my own repos, then yes, show me every comment and commit. But usually if I'm following a framework, I just want to know when something important happens, like a new version tag. And it's these larger frameworks that are usually busy and crowd out the other stuff.

Fully agree, I never look at the event stream at GitHub. It would become useful if I could select just forks, new repos, comments, and bug-related events.

I mentioned this in the comments section of post about blocking bullies. It would be great if you could follow a project or a person without having to see every comment and commit made. I watch around 100 repositories now and some of them are very active which results in my feed only containing updates from them.

As someone in the comments of this article (on the site) mentions, it would be nice if GitHub had something like Facebook's stream approach where you can hide individual posts or users. Perhaps even hiding a certain category of updates either globally or specific to each project?

I totally agree. Although my issue is more that I watch a ton of projects. It'd be nice to filter our dashboards, maybe group projects or people we follow.

This carries over a little from Twitter. Using follower count as some sort of authority/popularity index on one hand but using it power a feature (the stream) on the other hand.

Facebook solves this by filtering the stream based on relationship level you have with the user (building out relevancy vector). You get to keep the status of being "a friend"(follower) without it affecting your news stream.

I wanted to give this a shot. I first thought making a chrome/safari/etc. extension/plugin/etc. to filter your feed on the github dashboard (it may be a viable option), but i settled on making api calls (and using public data only).

I pushed it to http://gfnf.heroku.com (source is at https://github.com/eLod/gfnf). The interface obviously lacks some detail, but still usable i think. You can create filters and set what to include based on languages, users and repositories. Without requirements those events are selected that matches any of the conditions (e.g. OR). With requiring user(s) for example only those events get selected whose actor is in the filter.

Of course backed with the right data this should be much easier.

In my opinion, the news feed should never contain more than one item for a particular project, or for a particular user (for user-centric actions).

I realize that rolling up data for this sort of display is hard, but if 4" of vertical space are used up showing commit info for one project, my feed gets pretty useless when I follow lots of projects.

I'd mostly like to see what is trending among the users and projects I follow. As it stands, 99% of the "noise" is caused by 1% of the stuff I follow.

Lot's of good suggestions for GitHub coming up lately through various blogs.

I think it's high time GitHub put a public Brainstorm/Suggestions interface with possibility of voting the entries.

There's a GitHub profile on GetSatisfaction but there's no activity there.

I really like what http://www.githits.me is doing. I think it's a great way to improve your programming skills too by looking at great code written by some of the top github users.

BitBucket has the same problem with following projects. When I follow a project, I get messages about every person who starts/stops following it, so my main feed is mostly dozens of 'John Doe began following SomePopularProject'

Very new worldy to find it strange that a search for a city returns the original one and not the copy. They should have named it New Camebridge.

I'm currently following 866 coders and watching 356 repositories. My feed provides me with an immeasurable amount of value.