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GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

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Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#81

Post by vc98mvco »

caleblloyd wrote: post #48
danmaz74 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what the rationale behind this move is. I wouldn't even have noticed as I'm practically always logged in, but was that search bar lowering the conversion rates to free users, or what?

Probably because Github is constantly under DDOS attacks, search is computationally expensive, and they can't rate limit unauthenticated sessions. http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/26/github_wobbles_under_d...

That cannot be the case, becuse you can still search, it is just missing from the UI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322207

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#82

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

krapp wrote: post #79
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, github's lock-in fragmented "the open source scene". The internet and the web are distributed systems, there is no reason why all code has to be hosted with one proprietary service in order to be discoverable, just as there is no reason for hosting all websites with one proprietary service in order to be discoverable. That's what standardized protocols and interfaces are for.

There's no lock-in with github. It's a service that many people prefer to use, but nothing is stopping anyone from moving their repos elsewhere.

Well, first, there is lock-in for non-owners of projects: You cannot submit pull requests to pull from git repositories hosted elsewhere and without signing in. Which also is an incentive to use it for other things, once you have an account that you need in order to contribute.

Secondly, they do have proprietary features, embrace, extend, extinguish style.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#83

Post by mholt »

sdesol wrote: post #41

This 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 And as the screen shot below shows, you don't need to be logged in, to search a repository. 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 l…

This is actually awesome. I just installed it and like it so far. Thanks!

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#84

Post by krapp »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #82
krapp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no lock-in with github. It's a service that many people prefer to use, but nothing is stopping anyone from moving their repos elsewhere.

Well, first, there is lock-in for non-owners of projects: You cannot submit pull requests to pull from git repositories hosted elsewhere and without signing in. Which also is an incentive to use it for other things, once you have an account that you need in order to contribute. Secondly, they do have proprietary features, embrace, extend, extinguish style.

Unless they convert repos to a proprietary format that requires a Github client to use, don't allow git cloning or pushing, and are trying to add Github-only features to git itself, then I think "embrace, extend, extinguish" is a bit overblown.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#85

Post by true_religion »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #82
krapp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no lock-in with github. It's a service that many people prefer to use, but nothing is stopping anyone from moving their repos elsewhere.

Well, first, there is lock-in for non-owners of projects: You cannot submit pull requests to pull from git repositories hosted elsewhere and without signing in. Which also is an incentive to use it for other things, once you have an account that you need in order to contribute. Secondly, they do have proprietary features, embrace, extend, extinguish style.

Was this possible with any previously popular solution?

The only thing I can think of is patches via email, but that's just using no repository at all.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#86

Post by true_religion »

buro9 wrote: post #40
oliwarner wrote: post #28

Facepalm . 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 some…

Then one should get a couple of elastic search clusters, one for the guest users to hammer and DDoS and one for the authenticated users. Not only does this make the search cheaper and easier for the guests (just an index of public repos, so no permissions involved), it makes it easier to continue offering search to authenticated users whilst being able to mitigate L7 DDoS on the authenticated search (just block the u…

I feel like in our present age SEO is vastly overstated.

Google at one point gave you a lot indicators to which pages people were landing on and why. Now all that information isn't shared with site operators, so it's impossible to qualify statements like "internal searchable interface lead to more Google search traffic".

Maybe it was true previously, maybe it was true even last month, but is it still true with the latest Google update---no one can measure.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#87

Post by simoncion »

narsil wrote: post #9
simoncion wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, 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?

> 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.

> 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.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#89

Post by simoncion »

oliwarner wrote: post #32
FeepingCreature wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're right, then this is the sort of backlash that could have been trivially avoided by Github explaining their reasoning .

If it were a core element of the system that was actually removed from their users , I might agree.

I 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".

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#90

Post by pluma »

malditojavi wrote: post #35

Not comparable but airpair have a similar trick, asking to signup if you want to see their whole samples http://i.imgur.com/pVuVjrY.png and not obfuscated code samples I run a site ( http://petihacks.com ) with many of these little tricks if it's the interest of anyone

That would put me off using the site, let alone registering. Especially if it's meant to be social (i.e. I'm supposed to share links to content) -- I don't want to burden other people with the same hassle.
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