this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023

275 points (94.5% liked)

Programming

17668 readers

130 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

275

GitHub: Can no longer search code without being logged in (github.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit:

Since theres been some confusion with dates

In 2016 github made site side searching login only and hid the search bar if you werent logged in. This didnt include searching within a repository so that could still be done, just not all repositories

This year was the change being referred to in this link which made repository level searching require logging in

Blog post: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 142 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Hey Guys, Microsoft is cool now, they really care for Open Source now, they changed.

How do people always forget, how often they get fucked by that company in the last 20 years, that they think anything changed? They still abuse their monopoly, they still buy up the work of others and they still will then dilute it down for their bottom line and restrict it to force you to use a login to harvest data on your profile (see also Windows).

Everyone who said it's cool that MS bought Github, because they are now Pro-Open-Source: Can we please have a round table every 2 years and talk. Because I think you guys are victims of the Stockholm syndrome and do not even notice.

[–] takeda 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, fuck Microsoft. They haven't changed at all.

For example I remember when they held monopoly in a browser market and purposely broke their sites for other browsers.

Now the IE is gone, they have Chrome based Edge and are doing it again, if for example you try to use their office and make Teams call in Firefox it will refuse saying you should use Edge or Chrome. I'm guessing they are now trying again to claim they support another browser in case of antitrust, but Edge and Chrome is essentially the same thing. They just want to kill Firefox.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Apparently, this change was in 2016 - before MS bought them. However, I agree with your point. But the proof of that isn't in restricting search to logged in users. It's in how they ripped off FOSS code (esp GPL code) for training copilot. They did something that fundamentally damaged the roots of FOSS activity.

load more comments (6 replies)

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Fantastic way to start a shitstorm. You people don't even use search function logged out, because if you did, you would know they changed it in 2016. Microsoft has nothing to do with it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321623

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

searching across all of github was made to be logged in then

repository level searching though is relatively recent. Heres the blog post about the change dated in June this year https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/

This comment by an employee in the thread also calls out it was in 2023 and links to the blog post

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m getting so exhausted with the constant outrage in every goddamn feed in my life.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ignore it, laugh and increase your awareness that people are dumb as shit but also have the humility to realize you're also people and are also dumb as shit.

It makes life far more palatable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So begins our final transformation… idiocracy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The alternative is depression

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

do a post

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

I have been able to search logged out within a repository, up to this year. I think what you are referring to is search across all repositories. That was indeed disables a while ago. But things did change this year, unfortunately. So yes there is a legitimate and new issue... Once more.

[–] eronth 7 points 1 year ago

Oh is that why I can't seem to figure out where the damn search function is anymore? That's legit been driving me nuts for a few years.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The biggest news to me is that GitHub allows users to search code. Every single time I tried to search something in GitHub, search results were next to completely useless, and always a sure-fire waste of time and effort.

There's hope, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (5 children)

lol? That must have been a half ass attempt on your part because GitHub search is fantastic.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

must have been a half ass attempt

How hard do you need to try to use a feature for it to be considered decent? Do you expect something as basic as a search to put up a fight?

[–] minorninth 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on what happened when you tried to search? I’ve never had trouble.

[–] SpaceNoodle 4 points 1 year ago

GitHub search simply won't find search terms that I know are there (because I can grep them in my local repo). It also fails to search all branches. There's also insufficient filtering for filetypes or paths.

Maybe I'm just spoiled from having used OpenGrok, as well as knowing how to use basic tools like find and grep, all of which I find substantially more useful.

[–] grue 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Do you expect something as basic as a search to put up a fight?

Increasingly, you should be. Search algorithms from Amazon to Google are getting deliberately enshittified in order to force you to see what they want you to see instead of finding what you were actually looking for. For example, things like quotation marks and the minus operator no longer work. I would be supremely unsurprised to learn of Microsoft following suit.

[–] marmotworks 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Agreed their search is legendary

[–] MajorHavoc 2 points 1 year ago

This is news to me. I've been cloning and searching for years because web search was useless. And by useless I mean - I know the word I'm looking for appears in exactly four places, formatted and capitalized exactly this way - and GitHub web search still doesn't find it.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's gotten massively better - but only in the way that choosing to ride a bicycle to work is a massive improvement over sitting on a random rock.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don't find the search too bad but what does make it difficult is digging through a million forks of a library. Sometimes I want to find how other people used an obscure library method and I end up having to wade through endless forks with the same repeated bit of code.

This is more a complaint of people using forking as a like button but I do wish there was an option to exclude them from search.

[–] idunnololz 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It used to be pretty bad but they worked on it and made it a lot better over time.

[–] SpaceNoodle 3 points 1 year ago

It still sucks

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, I can't wait for Forgejo to implement federation. Gitlab might do so too after Forgejo shows that it's possible and gets a major following. They already are letting one external dude implement it after having slept on it for a good decade.

[–] MajorHavoc 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah. Right now GitHub is the only choice for my work to be seen; but someone is going to fix that by adopting activity Pub.

I'll run my own instance once that's an option.

Someone please correct me if it's already in play and I've just missed it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's still not here. If you're a Go or Ruby dev with some time, you could help out Forgejo or Gitlab.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

And this is why my Org rolled our own Gitea server.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

FWIW Sourcegraph chrome extension adds a neat “open in Sourcegraph” to github pages and SG is just superior. Why would you use Github's mediocre search either way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Reject shithub, return to open source

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Microsoft sucks for this, outlook, "open source vscode", and many other reasons.

That said my current workaround is to use sourcegraph.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's been this way for years. Really?

load more comments