Original link: https://mazhuang.org/2023/08/24/a-way-to-increase-on-github/
Today I happened to see a way to increase the exposure of projects and individuals on GitHub, but I felt that I couldn’t agree with this approach, and I have reported it to GitHub officials.
What exactly is going on? I raised an Issue last week on a project of the Vim plug-in tycoon tpope , but a week later, the tycoon didn’t respond, so I went to his GitHub homepage to check if he had any activity records this week, and saw his latest submission The activity is for the github/copilot.vim project – this is the official Vim plug-in project of GitHub Copilot. I also use it. I thought it was a coincidence, so I clicked on the project homepage and took a look. The big guy is really a big guy , turned out to be the main maintainer of this plugin, I couldn’t help but admire, and at the top of the Contributors list, I also found a message that I didn’t pay much attention to before, “Used by”:
Figure 1. copilot.vim’s Used by
Driven by curiosity, click in to see what projects you can build based on a Vim plugin:
Figure 2. Projects that depend on copilot.vim
The six items in the list are basically empty items or just displayed as the README of the personal homepage, only the penultimate item is a substantive item (but in the end it is found that it does not actually rely on the above plugin).
What they have in common is that there is a huge go.mod file in the project (the preliminary judgment is from akirataguchi115 ), which lists a large number of dependencies, with more than 6,000 lines, but they are not actually used . The “dependency” projects listed in it are hosted on GitHub. I glanced at them casually. Some familiar names, such as HelloGitHub , 996.ICU , etc. are all listed, and even my awesome-adb is included. Randomly open a few After looking at the links, they are all popular projects with 5K+ Stars, and basically they are not package projects, so they cannot be used as dependent packages.
Figure 3. go.mod file content
At this point, it suddenly dawned on me: These thousands of popular projects have a relatively large number of views, and then the “Used by” on their homepages will display the people in Figure 1 above, and you will see these projects in Figure 2 when you click on them… … Wonderful! The drainage effect must be good!
However, I am disgusted by this practice. This “cleverly” uses a function of GitHub, but it disrupts the normal linking and display of dependencies between projects, making it more difficult for those who really need to filter and find the correct information.
If you want to expose yourself on the homepage of popular projects, you should do it in normal ways, such as submitting PRs, raising Issues, participating in Discussions, and really doing some substantive projects based on them, etc., rather than through this “clever” Way.
Otherwise, even if you get traffic and exposure, it is just a “show bag” that is spurned by others.
While writing this article, I have reported this issue to the GitHub official, let’s see what the official thinks about it.
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