Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub's VP of Developer Relations:

Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).

This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.

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[–] 72 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sigh, here we go with the shittyness.

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    [–] 56 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Microsoft is terrible. Remember they also require you to use a Microsoft account for Minecraft now. Fuck this company so much

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And they're also deleting/deleted all classic Minecraft accounts from before that. They invented an incredibly weird and needlessly obtuse process to extend the migration deadline by 3 months (true final deadline is now mid December 2023), but that's seemingly it. Everyone not paying too much attention to their email just gets $30 worth of game deleted because of a completely arbitrary decision.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wait really? I bought it when it entered beta. Do I not own it anymore?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Anyone without access to their old email also loses their account. I don't remember which email address I used with my account back in the day (it's at least ten years old), and since I bought my key from a reseller, I don't have a receipt. Microsofts response was basically "not our problem, guess you'll have to pay us again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    But this is true for literally anything that requires email verification to login with?

    I think msft is scummy here but let's not pretend it's unusual that a company isn't going to help you if you can't access your email to verify your ownership.

    If I lose access to my Gmail account and am unable to login to Amazon bc of that Amazon ain't going to help me.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    In Minecraft's case, you never needed the email address beyond initial registration. Login was always through username and password, which I still have. Had I actually forgotten my credentials, that would've been fair, but I didn't. They just suddenly decided that that wasn't enough and they now want some ancient email address that little me had typed in once over ten years ago.

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  • [–] 43 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.

    So, Azure's bot protection is crap. Good to know.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Google can accommodate billions of searches globally on pages it doesn't control

    Microsoft can't index a tiny fraction of that number, even for it's own users.

    What a black eye for Microsoft engineering.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I migrated a few code repositories from Github to GitLab literally the same day it was announced that Microsoft was acquiring Github.

    The only regret I have is not evaluating a few other options like Codeberg or whatever. But GitLab's much better than Github.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Gitlab requiring a phone number verified account to report bugs kinda turned me off of that platform. Never used Codeberg but heard good things.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This has been implemented since like 2016, this is not news lol.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Can someone tell me why this is unreasonable?

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  • [–] [S] 25 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I think it kind of flies in the face of what Open Source Software should be. They're walling off code behind accounts in the Microsoft ecosystem.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    I think it’s kind of a slippery slope; but I don’t think the search itself being login walled is apocalyptic. As long as anonymous users can clone the repositories and browse the code, I can kind of understand why they don’t want to pay to run an elastic search cluster for bots’ benefit. Presumably in-repo search could be done locally by scrapers’ hardware.

    But if it turns into “login to view this repository” then GitHub will have turned evil.

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  • [+] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    GitLab, OneDev, Gitea, etc > shithub

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I'm pretty sure this only applies to non-indexed repos right?
    indexing is a very expensive process and usually takes 5-10 minutes for repos with 10k+ lines, and letting non-registered users start it is not the best idea in the first place

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This has been around for a while. It may be so they can track and throttle LLMs hovering up public code repos.

    Either way, it's a meh. Not sure why anyone would want to clutch their pearls over this. For those who need it, self-hosted gitlab is available.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago