Stargazer data restriction breaks ecosystem tools (Star History) and reduces transparency #204505
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KrisTHL181
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🏷️ Discussion Type
Product Feedback
💬 Feature/Topic Area
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I’m writing to raise a concern about the recent change that restricts access to stargazer data—now returning a 404 or unauthorized status for anonymous or unauthenticated API and web requests.
I fully appreciate the need to prevent excessive data scraping and reduce spam. However, this blanket restriction has created significant disruption for the open‑source ecosystem and for maintainers in particular:
Popular community tools like Star History and dynamically generated stargazer roster badges rely on fetching timestamps and user lists to produce growth charts and show appreciation for contributors and supporters. Under the current policy, these features either fail completely or render blank.
Stargazers have long served as a public signal of trust and interest in open‑source projects. Hiding who starred a public repository reduces transparency and weakens the social proof that often encourages new contributors to get involved.
Requiring maintainers to generate and route Personal Access Tokens (PATs) with write permissions—just to display a basic public star graph—adds unnecessary friction to everyday repository management.
At a minimum, I would urge the team to consider allowing repository owners to toggle public visibility of their stargazer list/history via the API, or to apply stricter rate limits and CAPTCHA challenges to deter automation, rather than completely cutting off read‑only API access for public projects.
I strongly request that the GitHub Product and API teams revisit this approach, or provide a native, public‑friendly mechanism that allows display tools to continue supporting the open‑source community.
Thank you for your time and consideration. For further context, please see the related discussion at https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/201209.
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