

Ask HN: Why aren't [private] GitHub contributions (in aggregate) public? - davidhariri

I&#x27;ve investigated this and it looks like Github has it&#x27;s own endpoint just for serving the green yearly contribution data that appears on your profile in the form of date:count_contributions (&quot;2015-06-08&quot; : 2 for example).<p>I only contribute to private repos so it looks to everyone else like I do nothing, when really i&#x27;m on a 10 day streak.<p>Does anyone know why they privatize this data? Seems to me like it&#x27;s overkill...
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zck
Because it's private data? Now, they could make it -- on an opt-in basis --
work the way you want, but I'm going to applaud a company that is erring on
the side of keeping private data private.

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davidhariri
Agreed. To close the discussion, I think it should be an option in settings.

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wmil
Two reasons.

First, they want to push people to open source small personal projects and
contribute to large OSS projects. Doing anything with an open project, even
just filing bug reports, counts towards your streak.

Second, it's more of a novelty thing since your contrib count is very easy to
hack. Just generate a local repo with commits on the days you want and upload
it.

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wodenokoto
because you can make useless private commits and look like you are super
active and no one can check up on you.

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athesyn
They've known about this for years, don't think it's a high priority for them
to ever change it.

What I suggest is moving non-commercial personal projects over to github so
there's at least some activity showing.

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partisan
Perhaps an option to make this public would be useful, but how helpful is the
metric without context?

