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GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in
- franze 11y agohttps://github.com/search https://github.com/search
- simoncion 11y agoTrue, but the search bar remains unavailable when you've used github.com/search to navigate to a repo. This is a serious regression. Off-topic: @dang, can we get a "Upvote this comment if has less than 1 point, else don't upvote it" button?
- narsil 11y ago> Off-topic: @dang, can we get a "Upvote this comment if has less than 1 point, else don't upvote it" button? The font-color of the comment (aside from links already visited) should be enough to indicate if it has positive or negative karma. Individuals can decide whether to upvote or downvote further at that point.
- mschuster91 11y ago> The font-color of the comment (aside from links already visited) should be enough to indicate if it has positive or negative karma. This is by far the biggest problem I have with HN. If there's not enough light in the room, I have problems differentiating between shades of grey/black if the contrast isn't high enough. And it makes downvoted-to-hell comments extremely hard to read because all the mobile apps seem to replicate this, and you can't just ctrl+a to add contrast.
- DanBC 11y agoWasn't HN experimenting with not greying comments that had a single downvote? I think this was an attempt to avoid downvote pile ons. I'm not sure it's still happening. I think it stopped the people who provide corrective upvotes.
- simoncion 11y ago> The font-color of the comment (aside from links already visited) should be enough to indicate... Yes, this is true. However, consider a comment with 0 points. If two HN visitors see it at roughly the same time, and both upvote it, it will have 2 points, rather than one point. What's more, neither visitor will see the effects of their action until at least one page reload and some time has passed.
- x1798DE 11y agoIs this a new change? I was really annoyed by this today when trying to navigate a repository on mobile. Pretty annoying.
- leeoniya 11y agoYes, this looks new...and terrible as it further silos discover-ability, which instead should be easier for open source projects. Github's mobile experience has been pretty bad in general. their mobile view doesnt even have the primary feed D: Instead it has a "repositories you contribute to", which is probably the most useless thing I could imagine for a logged-in view.
- r3bl 11y agoThis is not the only problem I have with a mobile version. Yesterday, I tried finding my own issue that I submitted two minutes ago to update it with a screenshot from my phone. Had to type in the full URL manually at the end. I love being able to quickly edit my notes from my phone, but no, I have to revert to the desktop version to be able to edit the file. Not being able to see my feed is definitely a huge disadvantage. All in all, I use the desktop version quite a lot. At least it's easy to switch to it.
- simoncion 11y agoPretty new. I was bitching about it to a friend immediately after I discovered it last week. Honestly, it makes Github feel much more like those vaguely-shady we-won't-tell-you-anything-substantial-until-you-give-us-an-email-address-that-we-can-sell-to-our-"valued partners" websites. That's... not really the direction you want to be heading in when you want to be known as a stable, reasonable place for widely-used projects to be hosting their source code.
- Coding_Cat 11y agoIt's been there some time on mobile, but very new on Desktop. I used to sometimes search for random gems on Github while I was on the toilet and have had to switch to Desktop view for quite some time in order to get a search bar. Now it's also removed from the desktop view.
- jannic 11y agoMy reaction when I wanted to searched for a file in a larger github repo, and the search bar was missing: I just cloned the repo and used `git grep` locally. What's the next step? Cloning only allowed for logged-in users?
- mgraupner 11y agoThis feels like a move away from offering the greatest opensource project hosting site to a walled garden. I was just browsing some repository and found a non linked reference to another project which probably is also on Github but there is no way of searching for it when I'm not logged in (and knowing the search URL somebody posted earlier). Pretty big UI fail and I wonder if this was intentional and if so if they took into account the annoyed users... I hope this will gain some more attion than the 6 comments right now, I really like Github for just browsing and exploring new projects, no need to be logged in for doing this and hopefully not just the first step to a more business driven Github.
- matt_o 11y agoI feel like this is a part of a trend that reflects how github itself is changing - slowly making access to things harder, then finally removing it. Github used to have an awesome and public way to explore projects (http://web.archive.org/web/20130730125837/https://github.com/explore http://web.archive.org/web/20130730125837/https://github.com...) - I remember using it a lot to look for projects to learn to read code because it allowed me to easily find projects by language. They replaced it with a flashier, but in my experience, much less useful tool that you have no control over - https://github.com/explore https://github.com/explore . I know I'm not the only one thinking of moving my repos to another provider or perhaps a self-hosted solution because of this direction.
- vc98mvco 11y agoSearch is still there https://github.com/search https://github.com/search although there is no link to it from the main page: https://github.com https://github.com. Try and find it if you can! However the search inside a repo is missing now and using site: to search inside a repo doesn't seem to work with Google.
- crazyhatfish 11y agoSearch inside a repo is still available just append /search to the url.
- Zolomon 11y agoThis really makes it difficult to work when you switch between machines, for example switching to a coworker's machine that doesn't necessarily have a github account or is not logged in. I use 2FA and it's really disruptive to force a login when your intention is to perform a few quick search requests.
- zhuxuefeng1994 11y agoArchive on a repo http://web.archive.org/web/20160319164131/https://github.com/Rochester-NRT/AlphaGo http://web.archive.org/web/20160319164131/https://github.com...
- Nutmog 11y agoMaybe it's to protect people who've accidentally included secrets in their repos from automated searching to hack their AWS accounts?
- OJFord 11y agoWouldn't offer much protection.
- Coding_Cat 11y agoNone at all really because it's still possible to use search it's just hidden from view.
- tuttifrutti 11y agoWell, it GitHub wants people to switch over to Gitlabs, they should just continue doing this stuff.
- xkarga00 11y agoReally bad move by Github. I sent them an e-mail nagging about it the very first moment I noticed it. I cannot imagine that they didn't expect any reactions, they just seem to not care about the whole open source community. I am looking for alternatives to it already.
- oliwarner 11y agoFacepalm. In this thread: A lot of overreaction from a lot of people who seem to expect the moon on a stick (for free) and who I could easily suspect have never had to run a resource-intensive system before. Doing search well is computationally hard. More than that, it's next to impossible to cache for because there can be so many variants. All-in-all, it's the ideal sort of system to attack if you want to DDoS somebody. Making people sign in is a tiny barrier to entry that stops anons hammering their system with uncacheable search requests. Yes, there's probably also a business-marketing argument that goes into this but if that's the sort of trade-off we need to keep Github free for open source, indefinitely, I'm all for it. And again, this is still free so stop being babies. If you don't like it you're very free to clone the repos out and search them yourselves. Want your anons to be able to search your stuff? Host it yourself and manage your own DDoSes.
- FeepingCreature 11y agoIf you're right, then this is the sort of backlash that could have been trivially avoided by Github explaining their reasoning.
- oliwarner 11y agoIf it were a core element of the system that was actually removed from their users, I might agree.
- simoncion 11y agoI am a user of GitHub. In part to protect against potential credential leakage through XSS and similar, and in part because I rarely actually need to log in to GitHub for the things that I do with it, I'm rarely logged in to my GitHub account. This change has a significant impact on my "workflow".
- zhuxuefeng1994 11y agoAlmost everything you mentioned does not make any sense. 1. Search is just not hidden in GUI for users, who are not logged in, but these users can still perform search as other people mentioned in comments 2. Github Search is definitely cached 3. It has nothing to do with DDOS. Do you expect Google requires you to sign in in order to prevent DDOS? Moreover, unless Github is totally wall-gardened, there are tons of ways to DDOS the service. I suggest you need to learn how DDOS actually works.
- malditojavi 11y agoNot comparable but airpair have a similar trick, asking to signup if you want to see their whole samples http://i.imgur.com/pVuVjrY.png http://i.imgur.com/pVuVjrY.png and not obfuscated code samples I run a site (http://petihacks.com http://petihacks.com) with many of these little tricks if it's the interest of anyone
- sdesol 11y agoThis seems like a good time to advertise my search engine for GitHub and Bitbucket. You can learn a little more about it at http://gitsense.github.io http://gitsense.github.io And as the screen shot below shows, you don't need to be logged in, to search a repository. http://imgur.com/W1Qx59h http://imgur.com/W1Qx59h To make the long story short, you can install our indexing engine on low cost platforms like $10 VPS plans from DigitalOcean/Vultr or on dated hardware like a 6 year old Dell laptop: http://gitsense.github.io/blog/benchmarking-march-14-2016.html http://gitsense.github.io/blog/benchmarking-march-14-2016.ht...
- ryan-c 11y agoHow much of github do you index? I was just raging this morning about how annoying it is that github ignores symbols when searching.
- sdesol 11y agoRight now we are indexing about 5,000 repos. We'll probably stop at 50,000 since we index an order of a magnitude more than GitHub does per repo. Our objective isn't really to index as many repos as possible, but rather we are focused on making it insanely easy for others to index what ever repos they want.
- mholt 11y agoThis is actually awesome. I just installed it and like it so far. Thanks!
- Cartwright2 11y agoI was banging my head against this earlier last week. It was such a jarring change to visit GitHub and not be able to navigate. It gives me pause to see how suddenly an easily-navigable site can become almost impenetrable with the removal of a single search bar. What are they thinking? The "Explore" menu is worse than useless, too. It is an interesting case study in UX - the difference between a great experience and an awful one can come down to a single, well placed search box. What is GitHub's rationale behind this jarringly awful, blatantly bad decision?
- mchaver 11y agoFor me search if one of GitHub's key features. It's nice to take a look other people's code, explore other coding styles, find examples of library usage which is great for under documented code. Unfortunately it does let you escape common characters that are common in code, doesn't give you the option of maintaining white space/line breaks in your query, doesn't let you search in other branches.
- AtticHacker 11y agoI personally don't like this and I hope Github decides to revert these changes as it doesn't really fit the open spirit. However if you still want to search and you're a duckduckgo user like me, simply use "bangs" in your url bar. e.g. !github some-repo
- smoyer 11y agoI just noticed that yesterday ... and I think it's a bad idea. One of the great benefits of the original SF and, until now, GitHub was the ability to discover OSS software. I often knew what I was looking for but had absolutely no idea what the project was named (and on Github it was already a bit harder since you'd find multiple forks of the same project. Since I commit and fetch repository data using SSH and a private key, I rarely (if ever) log into the GitHub UI I guess I see only down-sides from a user perspective - what are the upsides for GitHub? Tracking?
- 4lun 11y agoEven when logged in the search is not present on all pages, most notable being: https://github.com/explore https://github.com/explore
- alkonaut 11y agoThis makes it easy to block bots that repeatedly search for e.g credentials or other sensitive information. Not sure if that is the rationale though?
- fiatjaf 11y agoThese bots probably use the API.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kmfrk 11y agoGitHub is a pain to log in to on mobile, especially with 2FA. It's absurd that they would do something straight out of the Facebook playbook.
- CydeWeys 11y agoThis plus 2FA is a perfect combination for headaches. I'm already often not logged in while browsing GitHub because 2FA on every login is a pain, and now they're taking away features?
- mkj 11y agoMaybe it was just disabled due to load issues from web crawlers, no bad intent? Personally that seems the simplest explanation.
- Gophyr 11y agoJust go to https://github.com/search https://github.com/search
- lightcatcher 11y agoI noticed this a few days ago at work. I don't want to sign in to my personal Github account at work, but I'd still like to be able to search within a repo. I've been searching for code snippets with Google recently with lower (but non-zero) success rate.
- gracenotes 11y agoI'm reminded of this section from "Reddit: Lessons Learned From Mistakes Made Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month" (http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-learned-from-mistakes-made-scaling-to-1-billi.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-lea...): > Treat nonlogged in users as second class citizens. By always giving logged out always cached content Akamai bears the brunt for reddit’s traffic. Huge performance improvement. I have ended up using this philosophy in a website I've been working on lately, where people can post puzzles from The Witness. This includes simplifying decisions such as not tracking solved puzzles unless you have a user id, and not allowing navigating to a random puzzle either, as this routine depends on stored solves and upvotes. Supporting not-logged-in users just means extra code for me. In general, I don't think this is a bad attitude for a website to have. It is perhaps different in the case of GitHub, a highly depended-on and well established website which is actually removing functionality here. I would still assume good faith about the reason. And mobile login rates are a problem for everyone, I'm pretty sure, not just GitHub.
- hackerboos 11y agoThe "Explore" link is also hidden unless you sign out.
- mikey_p 11y agoDrupal.org recently did something similar with their issue tracker. Their rationale was that it's a performance issue, and there were large numbers of bots scraping the site using the advanced issue search. Requiring login for issue search allowed them to find out who was scrapping and then they could talk to them about what API improvements they needed, etc.
- gumby 11y agoI rarely use a site's own search anyway. Just use the site: keyword and do a google search. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=monty+python+site:github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=monty+python+site:github.com
- mchahn 11y agoWho uses github without being logged in? Why would you use it without being logged in? When I saw the front-page in the wayback machine I realized I hadn't seen the front-page in years. It certainly wasn't that fancy when I signed up.