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Tell HN: GitHub is blocking search unless you are logged in
Sign in to search code on GitHub. Before you can access our code search functionality please sign in or create a free account.
- bhaney 3y agoThis has been the case since the new code search replaced the old one ~9 months ago. The new code search is more resource intensive so Github chose to only make it available to users. I agree that it sucks to not have code search available when logged out, but it's not a new change and I don't think it was done with malicious intent.
- oohffyvfg 3y ago[dead]
- wildpeaks 3y agoI miss the old search, it was able to sort results.
- msmenardi 3y agoany requirement to log in is done with malicious intent. what other purpose could it hold other than to harvest your data for their own undisclosed purposes? Maybe anti-bots or something, but there are other ways to do that. Besides, a bot might just make an account.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 3y ago> any requirement to log in is done with malicious intent Wild!
- akkartik 3y agoI don't actually care whether intent is malicious or not. GitHub has not cared about me or individual devs like me for some time now. Time to drop it.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 3y agoHow does that work? You don't want to sign in to the site so now you will replace it with another site. Presumably you don't want to sign in to that other site as well, so what are you using the service for in the first place?
- voussoir 3y ago> now you will replace it with another site. Or you can self host! Github's changes pushed me to self host recently. https://voussoir.net/writing/git_dot_voussoir_dot_net https://voussoir.net/writing/git_dot_voussoir_dot_net
- akkartik 3y agoOh I'm happy to stay logged in to SourceHut!
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 3y agoDid they add code search now?
- akkartik 3y agoNo, doesn't look like it. (I had to check.)
- codegeek 3y agoI was very unhappy when they did this. The new search btw is shittier than the old one and this was a classic case of breaking the rule of "If ain't broke, don't fix it".
- BillyTheMage 3y agoThat's okay, GitHub's search is atrocious anyway.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoIt got a lot better. That’s kind of the point behind it being behind a login wall now.
- HeadlessChild 3y agoWhat? I think it is one of the strengths of GitHub compared to other platforms.
- jan_Inkepa 3y agoAt least for issues, their search got a lot worse recently - it doesn't do substring search in the same way (or maybe at all - I haven't checked in detail), so you can't search for non-initial words in compound-words. This makes searching through German issues an exercise in frustration... .
- SushiHippie 3y agoAgreed, it's really bad. I think they really improved the code/repository search, but finding issues got really worse. And IMO finding issues easily should be a top priority for a platform like GitHub.
- ritwikgupta 3y agoThe old search was much better than the new search. The new search can never find exact strings in my repos, even when I have copy-pasted those strings from my repo to the search bar!
- jestarray 3y agoIt's unfortunate but it's not as bad as Twitter/other forced logins for features. The difference is that making an account is free, you don't have to pay anything and there are no ads, whereas Twitter has incentive because it needs ad revenue and wants to look like it has more people on it
- thenbe 3y ago> not as bad as Twitter Can't help but feel that's what we're moving towards.
- snailmailman 3y agoI’ve been running into this too and it’s very annoying. Although I don’t think it’s particularly new either. Just feels like an unnecessary step. Sure I have an account and can log in, but why? I just want to know which file has X function, so i can read the implementation. I don’t want to have to download the repo or sign in.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoHow often are you not signed in to GitHub? You’re presenting this as a practical pain, but I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t signed in to GitHub.
- andreareina 3y agoI don't have a work GitHub account and I keep personal stuff out of my work computer. The number of times I've wanted to search an open source codebase without cloning it yet is significantly nonzero. I've also wanted to do code search on my phone, where I have no need to be logged in so I'm not.
- jhgg 3y agoSo register a throwaway for work and your phone. Seems easily solvable in a few seconds!
- dasyatidprime 3y agoSeems like a good time to mention that (despite anecdotal lack of enforcement) GitHub's terms of service continue to officially forbid having more than one free account for manual use. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#3-account-requirements https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
- dingensundso 3y agoThat rule sucks. I want to keep work and personal separated.
- Departed7405 3y agoThis will greatly reduce Github ability to be an App Store. Reminder that GitHub isn't banned* or censored by Microsoft in China, so it's a good way to download VPNs and other banned apps. *There is some frequent outages on an individual level, but if you try enough, it works. EDIT : This doesn't affect search of repos. My bad.
- huhtenberg 3y agoThey required to be logged in for the code search for years now. The rest (repos, issues, etc.) is still searchable as is. At least where I am at.
- joshxyz 3y agohere's the real kicker to me: you cant sort the search results these days by date. whoever fucked this up thinking he's doing good for humanity deserves to be hit with 65,535 lightning bolts in exponentially increasing amperages.
- midchildan 3y agoIt's not only code search that is affected. Issue and pull request search are affected as well. Here's a screen recording of that happening: https://imgur.com/a/BT6uRIe https://imgur.com/a/BT6uRIe It's been quite a while since GitHub started gating code search behind a login. However, they recently started gating other types of search as well. The worst part is, you don't notice it immediately for two reasons. First, it doesn't happen on all repositories. I didn't experience this yet with NixOS/nixpkgs for example, possibly because the high volume of activity going on there prevented the switch. Second, the search results do show up right after you hit the search button. However, it shows up a login screen as soon as you start to navigate around the search results. To me, I can't help but feel like they're testing the waters by not making it immediately obvious that this is happening. The inconvenience doesn't stop there. As you can notice from the screen recording, once you get shown the login page, GitHub will continue to show the login page even if you hit the back button. On top of that, the search query is sometimes not included in the URL, making search results difficult to share. I get GitHub wanting to require logins for code search, since it takes up computing resources. However, there's something to be said about gating search for issues and pull requests of open source projects without the project maintainers being notified.
- DarthNebo 3y agoThis is old news
- mdaniel 3y agoDespite their shitty rug-pull <https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/pull/53345 https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/pull/53345>, I do really like Sourcegraph and one doesn't (currently?!) need to be logged in to use it: https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search and they have a handy rewrite pattern such that one can just plug the repo path into the URL for quick searching e.g. https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/JetBrains/intellij-commun...
- akkartik 3y agoOh you better believe it's only currently. At least if they grow as successful as they would like to.
- mathfailure 3y agoAnd it's not blocking search just for non-logged users, but also for users whose accounts got 'flagged'. My account got flagged.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Alifatisk 3y agoOh, we're at the extinguish phase.
- beeburrt 3y agoIt's time we all moved away from GH
- jazzyjackson 3y agoself hosted gitea is really a pretty thorough drop in replacement IMO
- MakeThemMoney 3y agoI just create a new account every time I want to search for something
- simonblack 3y agoWe said that GitHub would become trashed once MSFT got their grubby little fingers into it.
- henriquez 3y agoGitHub considered harmful.
- zzo38computer 3y agoOn another computer that I was not logged in, something else happened. It didn't say log in, but the search results were displayed and then one second later it removed them and displayed an error message (which did not explain the problem, but it did not ask you to log in, either). I was able to view the search results by pausing execution of scripts using the debugger, though.
- johannesrexx 3y agoI believe that Cory Doctorow would suggest that the enshittification of GitHub is now in full swing.
- smittywerben 3y agoGithub was rate-limiting me from doing just basic searches. I hit them, paging through results too fast, and it times me out. My account is a few years old, but admittedly, it lacks engagement à la social media (favorites, repos, forks, etc). Anyway, I don't buy Github's excuse that the new search 'takes more CPU power'; this must be to prevent scraping data for LLMs. Have you hit the new search rate limits?
- syndacks 3y agoNeed to search on GitHub? Make an account! Don’t want to make an account? Leave!
- akkartik 3y agoFor several months now I refuse to stay logged in to Github. I login on an incognito window when I need something, and log out when I'm done. Github javascript is disabled outside of incognito windows. This is the same playbook I have followed with success to disconnect from Facebook, Linkedin, Google, Reddit and Twitter. (And Quora. And Medium..) When it's inconvenient it just makes me try to avoid these sites.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xfragrance 3y agowhat a shame
- gitgud 3y agoI’ve always found GitHub to be quite generous with what functionality they give free users, especially visitors that don’t have an account. They kind of paved the way in that regard… Some sites would probably put everything behind a login-wall. I can imagine some alternative version of git hosting with the following message: Sign in to clone this repo
- eastbound 3y agoCloning without logging can be seen as important: - It makes it simpler for millions of CIs to check out the code unauthenticated, - It enables usecases such as “Here is public data as a JSON, it’s our list of IP addresses, just integrate that to your firewall”, - NPM. NPM entirely. - Isn’t it required for open-source? If they restricted it behind a login, could we still say we deliver the code to our customers?
- tkiolp4 3y agoThat’s why I stopped using it at work (on my company’s laptop I don’t want to log in to github using my personal credentials)
- xinayder 3y agoThey also completely removed the activity from people you follow from your homepage, claiming everything should be under "explore", while promoting their recommendations provided by an algorithm. They claimed it "used too many resources". Everyone complained about this decision, fast-forward 6 months, Microsoft doesn't give a fuck. I used the homepage to learn about new projects people I follow are working on or interested it, but now it's nearly impossible to find out. Enshittification is real.