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Comment by damncabbage | Hacker News Reader

It looks very nice, but there's a couple of things that bug me:

- Now "owning" a repo seems even more important. Regularly commit to someone else's repo? Not evident unless you go digging for it.

- The timeline bar-graph used to show blue for your own commits and grey for other people's. Now it either looks like you did all the work (your own repo), or someone else did it (forked repos).

Even if these two don't matter to you personally, I fear it'll help drive behaviour you see a lot in the Ruby community where, unless it's a huge project like Rails, people start their own versions in the hope of getting it popular and recognised. There's little status to be gotten from tinkering on "someone else's" repo.

(Think social startups except with code libraries.)

View on HN

They've also removed the "traffic" graph, that showed you how many people have viewed your project over the last 90 days or so (I can't remember the exact amount). That was a very useful way to gauge interest.

Honestly, IMO, GitHub has been getting worse, not better, since the spring. I have no idea why, but they're taking away features -- perhaps to speed up the site?

Anyway, I don't get it. They dropped their "social coding" motto awhile back, perhaps they're targeting other things now? Maybe they had to scale back features to raise that $100 million? It's a mystery.

Yeah, the removal of the graph sucks.

Call me silly, but I really liked that graph .. it gave me a little boost of pride to bring up my github page and see the effect of a burst of hacking activity in visual form. Obviously the info's still around in the commit logs, but it seemed much more obvious in the graph.

I guess computing the graph did probably consume CPU time, but isn't that exactly the sort of thing that differentiates github from a "dumb" git repo provider?

I agree it sucks to have lost the traffic graph. Would love to have it back

I really, really miss the traffic graphs. Before I moved to github I had google analytics running for each of my projects, which was absolutely amazing for discovering when people talked about them. The increased contributions is worth the trade off, but I do miss that info.

a friend of mine built this which you might find useful: http://githalytics.com/

The problem with that is it only tracks a single page.

I've complained a few times on twitter to @github about removing the traffic graph. I used it as a motivator myself, and a way of trying to prioritise what project to work on.

A spike in traffic could mean I invested that extra time to land something new in a project, that was a great way for github to ensure commitment in projects.

Apart from that I think every change in the last six months have been good.

Asked @holman about the blue (https://twitter.com/holman/status/248690023887675392):

  @damncabbage: @holman Was the removal of the blue from
  the repo commit timeline bar-graphs intentional? Update
  looks good, by the way. :)

  @holman: @damncabbage definitely. Blue behind text
  would be really distracting.

  @damncabbage: @holman Hmm, point. What about having
  the blue appear when the timeline fades in on hover,
  or just a darker shade of grey?

  @damncabbage: @holman The post over at HN has a few 
  reasons why some of us are a bit blue about the
  missing, uh, blue in the graphs:
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4546703 

  @holman: @damncabbage We’re pretty pleased with it.

(??? Confused about that last one.)

I miss the blue too, so I made an extension that adds the old-style coloring for your commits: https://github.com/typpo/github-participation-graph

... And the blue is now back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560768

The primary workflow promoted by github seems to be to fork (using github's sense of the word) and use pull requests to contribute. This workflow, I imagine gets you to spend more time on the site, as opposed to using github simply as an ssh endpoint. This workflow also seems to be the biggest complaint about github by hardcore git users.

The change then looks to be simply an effort to highlight the workflow they want you to use.

I must however note that any effort to shout conspiracy should be tempered by the fact that github makes its money by selling private repos, so the above change, while reinforcing their suggested workflow, does not necessarily benefit them directly.

The primary workflow promoted by github seems to be to fork (using github's sense of the word) and use pull requests to contribute.

I agree, I'm definitely not disputing that.

With the removal of the blue from the commit timelines, the profile of someone who forks and commits to a bunch of popular projects (eg. Rails, jQuery, MiniTest) now looks the same the profile of someone who just forks a bunch of projects; you need to dig around a bit to tell the difference.

(I've been seeing an increasing trend of people who fork popular projects and don't do anything with them; I don't know if it's trying to fake activity on GitHub to look better when going for a job or what. Examples: https://github.com/chardy https://github.com/yanovitchsky https://github.com/VasyOk )

> There's little status to be gotten from tinkering on "someone else's" repo.

Agreed. Additionally, even if you are a collaborator on someone else's repo it doesn't show on your profile, which greatly under-represents a user's activity on Github.

This. I do my most interesting work on a project started by someone else where I am a collaborator. In addition I work on repos in organisations. It would be nice if these connections were more clear.

I'm seeing forks just as prominently as "owned" repos, so I don't see the problem.

If you fork a repo and then issue a pull request, you 'own' the forked version, but the original still doesn't show up.

This breaks for the traditional git workflow, which doesn't revolve around the 'forking' step.

In other words, if I commit regularly to another person's repository, even if I don't have a (public) 'forked' version, those commits should still show up regardless.

Agreed - But is it feasible to put this into our own server and link in from say the readme (is there anything user generated on profile (on iPhone now))

it's not a great solution but hack away till Preston-Warner gets the feedback I say - if there is a readme on profile I might try it

"> There's little status to be gotten from tinkering on "someone else's" repo.

So github is about status? Silly me, I thought was contributing to OSS.

There's nothing wrong with wanting recognition for work that you do. Especially when Github is a great way to show future employers your contributions to OSS. Why make that harder to see?

Your opinion doesn't change "My Library" behaviour I'm worried this will help drive.

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