Can no longer search code without being logged in. · community · Discussion #77046
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Select Topic Area Product Feedback Body This is revolting and an anathema to the open source movement. A movement, I might add, Microsoft is abusing here. We're told that this is for security... Bu...

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.

  • sexy_peach@feddit.de
    132·
    10 months ago

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

    • chameleon@kbin.social
      3·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • BlueBockser@programming.dev
        1·
        10 months ago

        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)_/¯”

          • can@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            10 months ago

            Well that’s some bs. I haven’t played in a while but the principle of it still bothers me. Especially since I’d have never known if not for reading this thread.

  • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    111·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • satan@r.nfEnglish
      93·
      10 months ago

      People who haven’t hosted anything bigger than a two digit daily visitors tells Microsoft how bad their bots protection is.

    • detalferous@lemm.ee
      23·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        10 months ago

        TBF going by load times, GitHub search was perpetually on the brink of collapse since well before the Microsoft acquisition. I daren’t imagine what the indexes look like.

    • btp@kbin.socialOP
      11·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • [email protected]@lemmy.federate.cc
        51·
        10 months 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.

      • i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        They’re not walling off any code. They’re restricting use of their server-side search resources. Other repository hosting services don’t have code search at all.

      • phillaholic@lemm.ee
        02·
        10 months ago

        It’s more gating off than walling. If it keeps access and usage free I’m ok with it.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
      11·
      10 months ago

      It is a betrayal to the developers who put our projects up there. We wanted everything to be freely accessible, and of course this is just another step in enshittification of the service. Remember that many of us have small projects with few viewers, and we know that the extra burden on the server side isn’t even measurable. Yet our work is less accessible.

      • andreluis034@lm.put.tf
        1·
        10 months ago

        The code is still accessible, you just can’t use the code search function in the web, which normal git doesn’t have anyway.

  • voxel@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    10 months 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

  • fubarx@lemmy.ml
    32·
    10 months ago

    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.