Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?

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• Hacker News
• If you need to just offer free access to your open source repo, gitea is a nice alternative and super easy to self host. Github also has the community, which you lose, true, but it depends on what matters more to you. I can help you setup gitea really fast if you're interested
  by onel
• Advanced Search doesn't work unless you're logged in, but it's been like that for at least a year.
  by pixelesque
• It’s been like that since very beginning.
  by throw1234567891
• Depends on what you mean by login wall. They are, technically, behind a login/auth wall as you can only make 60 requests to their API per hour. Scrapping these days is extremely challenging as defenses do in-depth checks on your browser to make sure you are a "real" person.
  by csomar
• With AI and all the new projects/forks/updates, github is one busy place.

  I wasn't browsing /trending on github until I started using AI, wanting to see what cool projects people are working on.

  by IronWolve
• Some parts of the website are explicitly login-only, yes. I sometimes tend to follow link to gh from my mail on phone where I'm not logged in and found that e.g. you can't see any CI results without logging in.
  by nagisa
• GitHub specifically put out a changelog about the stargazers API endpoint to restrict open access because of its use for spam and abuse. I believe this is more about user data than code. Obviously restricting public access to Git would be a different tier.
  by ocdtrekkie
• I think this would push even more small to medium sized busineses towards self hosting which I would love to see
  by BorisMelnik
• Hard to say, the only people who know are those internal to MS and GH and know, or who have told others. You have copies of your repos in other systems, yeah? Have a plan you don't need rather than need a plan you don't have.

  Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44876289 - August 2025 (97 comments)

  by toomuchtodo
• Codeberg constantly returns this just because I use an outdated Safari: 'If you are an AI scraper and wish to not receive garbage when visiting Codeberg: stop visiting. If you are not an AI scraper: contact Codeberg.'
  by reconnecting
• Fine for my closed source stuff, but my open source work is specifically meant to be viewable, even by non-technical people doing recruitment or looking over my portfolio.

  I've put up with a lot of stuff, but this would be my personal last straw.

  by Fordec
• It just pisses me off bro like from every angle ai is trying to fuck us.
  by gokuljs
• On top of the that now most of the open source contributers are assholes. they are insulting people as well.
  by gokuljs
• The whole GitHub infra is cracking under the AI-boom's increased load. This can very well be just another symptom of the same thing.
  by fodkodrasz
• such a cop-out when its policy shifts that are destroying it.

  let's be real : it's microsoft.

  by serf
• Don't buy the BS about them being overwhelmed by AI code when they've also had terrible vibe-coded feature rollouts repeatedly break the site and are trying to rapidly increase their feature surface to kill off competing test runners and review managers. Maybe github, if well managed, would struggle in the current day - but it simply isn't.
  by munk-a
• I think it’s been functionally login-only for a while, unfortunately.

  Any time I try to use the site while logged out I immediately hit all sorts of rate limits and spam prevention measures. Issues and pull requests stop loading almost immediately. Searches are extremely restricted, like i think literally one search is all you get sometimes unless you login.

  It’s hard to tell how much of this is intentional and how much is GitHub infra not being stable. My daily renovate bot that looks for updates for specific packages times out and encounters errors almost every time it runs and it’s barely doing anything. And it has an api key. I know I’m not hitting limits, some queries just don’t work >50% of the time on some repos.

  Sometimes I see there are 200 issues, I click the issues tab, and there are zero. Is GitHub down? Am I rate limited? Do I just need to login? Or I know an issue/PR exists, and it just doesn’t appear when I search for the title or keywords verbatim. I just manually bookmark or subscribe to any important issue or PR now because the UI can’t be trusted anymore.

  by snailmailman
• > like i think literally one search is all you get sometimes unless you login

  Lucky you - search never seems to work for me anonymously, and even when logged in the search isn't great.

  by jamesfinlayson
• > Any time I try to use the site while logged out I immediately hit all sorts of rate limits and spam prevention measures.

  When this started happening to me I realized that I can't rely on Github as infrastructure anymore. I now vendor all the repos I need.

  Self-hosted forges like Forgejo make it pretty easy to mirror repos so you have everything locally. You don't get issues though.

  by Asraelite
• I don't have an immediate direct source but read yesterday GitHub stars are being "obfuscated" because they're being scraped to spam popular projects -- or something similar.

  Edit found the link [0], do not believe it mentions reason but links github blog

  From Github [1]: > These endpoints and views currently expose public lists of stargazers and watchers, and this information has increasingly been misused to collect user data for spam activities which negatively impacts user experience and platform trust.

  [0]: https://www.star-history.com/blog/github-stargazer-api-restr...

  [1] https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-30-upcoming-access-res...

  by dieselgate