May be obvious, but would rather know if you saw PRs-per-repo decline. Otherwise, I wonder if some very frequent-PR repos (automated or otherwise) had previously skewed numbers. Also curious if early numbers for this half can be obtained/compared.
Don't assume this "oversight" is an accident or result of stupidity. In one case it was absolutely used to justify a promotion of a yes man.
They need another datasource. There's another classic not reliable system, survey programmers to see what they are using.
Oh, this made me connect some dots. At first I figured increase in GitHub activity during the pandemic was because people were home more and had more time to contribute to open source.
But a lot of people took that time to learn software development. And a lot of courses will have you publish your learning projects to GitHub as a way to learn version control and processes (and also to promulgate awareness of, and analyze their course since there's often templates involved).
Often this is just creating repos and pushing them, and since TFA directly looks at pull requests, perhaps this isn't it, unless these courses regularly include lessons on how to do a pull request (perhaps from yourself to your own repo).
If that was a significant factor, it would make sense why the activity is down.
> They need another datasource.
Agreed here, the source is very imperfect.