How do you use the Contributors page?

[rmathew1992]

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👋 We'd love to know how you use the Contributors graphs on the Repository Insights tab (navigate to https://github.com/[REPO_NAME]/graphs/contributors), or click on "Insights" < "Contributors" from your repository.

Feedback we'd love to hear from you

• How often do you use these graphs?
• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?
• What data are you looking to get from it?
• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?
• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?
• Anything else you think we should know?

[Bellisario]

I think this feature can be improved by hiding bots (maybe with an option) and showing humans only.
For example, I don't think is good (for me and my contributors) to see a bot (most Dependabot) getting positions over an human that wrote actually code.

Edit

As @ghiculescu noticed here (make sure to upvote him, too) the contributors page says Contributions to main, excluding merge commits and bot accounts but bots are not excluded, instead there is just a [bot] text appended at the end of their committer name.

[gospino123-uf]

I think you should be able to remove a contributor, like in my case, where an individual made a seemingly helpful contribution but the contribution turned out to be conniving and the contribution was ultimately removed.

Thankfully, in my case, it was a minor contribution. However, the individual is still visible as a contributor, which devalues the repo's integrity in my opinion.

If there is an option to remove a contributor from a personal repo, I have not found it.

[Amin1383Amin]

Ok

[defibagira]

Yeah, clicking and dragging in the graph is not a good UX.

I most often want to look at the current year, and in a 10 year old repo that is quite hard to get exactly right. A "this year" preset would be amazing.

[shaynethiessen]

How often do you use these graphs?
-Weekly.
Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?
-My own.
What data are you looking to get from it?
-Team Performance.
What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?
-Probably none. It's just interesting.
What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?
-Allow choosing date range, instead of forcing it to "all time",
Anything else you think we should know?
-I love GitHub.

[CactusPuppy]

You can click and drag anywhere on the graph to specify a specific date range.

Today I learned, and I've been using this particular feature for a long time. If I've missed that feature, I think a lot of other people are unaware of it too.

[andymerskin]

It might be nice to have presets like 30 days, 60 days, etc. as well, to quickly measure common ranges.

[ghiculescu]

It might be nice to have presets like 30 days, 60 days, etc. as well, to quickly measure common ranges.

Yeah, clicking and dragging in the graph is not a good UX.

I most often want to look at the current year, and in a 10 year old repo that is quite hard to get exactly right. A "this year" preset would be amazing.

[moving-bits]

Using it on a regular basis for our own repos, out of curiosity, but also to update our contributors pages in the (FOSS) app.

Presets like "current year" or "last twelve months" would help (but are not a "must-have" for us).

[sww314]

The clicking and dragging on the specific date range is super annoying. I like to look at particular ranges. For example over the whole year - really annoying to try and line up the graph to a specific date. Just let me type my date!

[ryao]

• How often do you use these graphs? Weekly
• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories? Just where I do the most work.
• What data are you looking to get from it? I use it to motivate myself by showing myself that my work is having an effect.
• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page? Do even more development.
• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you? Provide an easy way to reset the date range if I accidentally mistap on it from a mobile device. That way I do not need to refresh.

[jojomatik]

I agree with these answers, one addition is that I'd like certain generated (lock-)files to be ignored from the contributions stats as mentioned in #15148

[bjrne]

Not just lockfiles, if there is a way to exclude most (all) generated code this would remove a lot of the clutter. For example all code that was generated automatically after running py manage.py startapp xyz for a django project. Other languages and frameworks have this too. I understand that this can never be 100% accurate and there will be egos that suffer from this, but it would remove a lot of the clutter in the current graphs.

Currently, in repos where generating files is common, these graphs are completely useless. Maybe just counting the actions and not the loc would help, similar to the diagram on the profile page, just as a graph.

[bulatgab]

Maybe add a feature that allows us to exclude certain folders where the generated files are, e.g. dist

[syrte]

How often do you use these graphs?

• Daily

Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?

• Other repositories

What data are you looking to get from it?

• The active contributors and developing activity, which helps to estimate the scale of the community and if the project is still under active development.

[versusbassz]

My opinion about the page is exactly the same. I find "Contributors" page VERY informative speaking about choosing a maintained solution for my projects.
And yeah, bots could be hidden, IMO

[zicklag]

This is pretty much my evaluation ( though I use it more like bi-weekly ). When evaluating other projects I:

• Check the stars
• Check the contributors tab
• Maybe take a peek at the pulse tab
• And then check out the latest/pinned issues if any.

[XOXO045]

Raffle key girh

[jdmalandruccolo]

What data are you looking to get from it?

Would love to add metrics around code reviews. High quality code reviews are essential contributions to a healthy project.

[lwasser]

I second and third this. @adlai @rmathew1992 i think that commit only metrics around contributions is really not presenting the full picture.

i have a specific example
i'm building a community organization and we are working jointly on some guidebooks for python packaging
https://github.com/pyOpenSci/python-package-guide/graphs/contributors

However if you look at the PR's you can see we have many people leaving comments and in line commits sometimes (but not always).

pyOpenSci/python-package-guide#14

I think issues are contributions too. But on pr's i'd say review feedback as it valuable as direct commits. If github could capture these types of non commit based metrics it would be invaluable to growing communities like ours. while this might be difficult you could capture total # of unique contributors across issues and prs and then on pr's maybe both commits AND review comments as being contributions is an idea. +1000 to the comment above!!!

[HamzatAbdulazeez]

i think that commit only metrics around contributions is really not presenting the full picture.

[eldare]

Contributions Commits should not be the default metric, it's pointless.
IMO, there should be a new default metric, a combined Additions & Deletes.

[horrox]

How often do you use these graphs?
Once every 1-3 months

Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?
For our own repositories

What data are you looking to get from it?

• I want to see who is most actively contributing to see who is best to ask questions, about recent changes, etc.
• I also use this as one source of data for employee reviews (we don't track this as a metric but I find it informative in the whole picture of their contributions to our organization, most of the time they love to hear how they've contributed and to know that we see that contribution).

What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?
Follow-up conversation with contributors

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

• The data is presented is from the beginning of time. I'd like to be able to review just the last few months or last year. In some ways, I don't really get a lot out of who contributed in the past but who's contributing now. (The guy in the top slot with the most commits and 50K additions in one repo hasn't worked in the repo for two years.)
• It would also be nice to be able to look at not only commits but PRs (maybe using merges to master/main as a proxy) and PR reviews (this is one step removed from the repo itself). Often time this matches up roughly to tickets handled.
• Instead of showing every single contributor, maybe show top 5 and leave the rest for an expandable portion of the page

Anything else you think we should know?
GitHub is inspiring.

[heystewart]

The data is presented is from the beginning of time. I'd like to be able to review just the last few months or last year. In some ways, I don't really get a lot out of who contributed in the past but who's contributing now. (The guy in the top slot with the most commits and 50K additions in one repo hasn't worked in the repo for two years.)

You can select a subrange on the main graph and it filters the data underneath --- discoverability problem with the ux i guess

[mikeabdullah]

Yes, discovery problem. But also a bit also has the issue that if the start of your repo's history is a very large import from another source, then the millions of lines of code that introduced will always drown out anything else the graph might ever show. It would be really useful to trim this down in a way that also affects the Y axis.

[llebanowski]

• It would also be nice to be able to look at not only commits but PRs (maybe using merges to master/main as a proxy)
  👍

[gennitdev]

I like the suggestion to show contributions based on PRs. Some contributors put a bunch of commits in a single PR and others squash them into a single commit, so the PR counting feature would help compare them more fairly.

[ShadReyes]

It would be really cool to be able to see contributes broken down by week. I want to be able to see how much code was added/deleted by each member on a given week.

[5HT2]

You can select a date range by a given week.

[FreekBes]

It would be useful to have an overview of the amount of lines per contributor that are still mostly present in the latest commit on the main branch, so that you know who (presumably) knows most about the current codebase. Especially useful for large refactors.

[jvandort]

Further, in addition to filtering by "Additions", "Deletions", and "Commits", it would be nice to sort by "Additions minus Deletions" to compare contributors based on the total number of lines they've added to the project.

[ptoro]

I love the idea but this would be difficult to do accurately since codebases have a lot of boilerplate generated code.

Something that could work is getting the total line count by contributor for a specific directory since most projects have the non-generated code inside a single directory (e.g. src).

[sv3ndk]

What data are you looking to get from it?

Trying to gauge how active a project is and how many contributors are active

What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?

• Decision to depend on such library for my projects (if actively maintained)
• Decision to donate to the contributors (if project is small, important and has few contributors...)

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

Maybe some filters:

• ability to hide bots (e.g. bots submitting PR for updating dependencies)
• showing graphs in number of PR and/or number of active days might be more relevant than number of commits

Anything else you think we should know?

Github is probably in a good position to detect projects that are critical to OSS "public infrastructure" and maintained by a small number of contributors in their spare time => could decide to improve visibility on such cases and help critical maintainers attract support (either through PR or financial).

[turboMaCk]

I'm using it mostly on work repositories to get a sense of trends - like if we're slowing down or not in terms of work done etc as a rough indicator of how we're doing.

[freeliujian]

I hope have a search Contributors function in Insights

[tLLWtG]

Yes, and a full list of all contributors (sometimes there are only top 100 contributors shown)

[ioogle]

1. How often do you use these graphs?

2-3 times a week

2. Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?

Team repos

3. What data are you looking to get from it?

a. code ranking, b. commit counts, c. contribution lines

[nogginbox]

I'd like to see more than the top 100 contributors. I like seeing myself on the list and I'm sure I'm the 101st contributor on many of the repos I've committed too.

Top contributors this year/month/week would also be good.

[hashimaziz1]

Seconded, currently using this to browse through FFmpeg's contributors and figure out how much of Fabrice Bellard's original contributions are still a part of the project, but this is currently not possible because he's presumably no longer in the top 100 contributors.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74828879/how-much-of-modern-ffmpeg-is-written-by-fabrice-bellard

[matteorossini]

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

• Add a legend to y axis.
  Even if the represented metric is already clear (it is shown at the top-right corner of the page, e.g. Contributions: Commits, and other metrics are selectable as well), it is not clear which is the time period the numbers on y axis refer to: are they the number of commits per week? Or, per month, or per day?
• Make it an histogram.
  As the filled area of the plot is smoothed out, it is not clear to which period a “bar” refers to: when seeing a wave-like curve, one has to continuously guess which are the real data points and which parts of the curve connect the data points without carrying additional information.

[aizazansari]

How often do you use these graphs?

• Weekly

Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?

• Both

What data are you looking to get from it?

• Top contributors for a codebase so that I know who's the POC

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

• Number of lines of code contributed instead of number of lines contributed. The latter also takes into account .txt, .json etc which is not very useful in some cases

[lucbv]

• How often do you use these graphs?
  A few times per year, maybe once a quarter.

• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?
  I look at my own repositories

• What data are you looking to get from it?
  I would like to have merged PRs instead of commits as some folks like to squash and others don't which makes commit a subjective metric.
  Additionally the number of reviews would be great as a PR cannot merge without reviews (at least it should not...)

• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?
  Provide feedback to team members

• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?
  It looks fine currently but please add the data mentioned above.

• Anything else you think we should know?
  Nope, that's it for me, but if you can update us on when/if you plan to make changes that would be great.

[Lord-V15]

I would love to have a contributors search option. Not sure if this is already being worked on or not.

[erikdtw]

A slightly unusual use case but I thought I share it with you. I'm one of the authors of the Thoughtworks technology radar, a publication with 200k+ readers. Thoughtworks is a medium-size global software consulting company, and we publish the tech radar twice a year, listing ~100 interesting technologies we've come across in each report. This is not market research, we ask our consultants what to include.

In the process of deciding which of the proposed technologies will end up on a given volume of the radar, we usually consult the contributors page on Github (for open source software only, of course).

How often do you use these graphs?

Twice a year

Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?

Other repositories

What data are you looking to get from it?

Is the project still actively developed? How long has it been around for? Are there key contributors? How many? Which organisation are they affiliated with?

What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?

As alluded to above, if we find that the software has been around for years and development activity is low / has decreased substantially year over year, we will likely not include it in our report. If it is very new with only one contributor we consider waiting for another six months before including it, to see whether it will make it to an at least somewhat stable state. It also affects how we classify the software.

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

Works well as is (for our use case).

Anything else you think we should know?

I'm a user and maintainer of open source software, too. What I described above was only the use in the context of the Thoughtworks tech radar.

[xaizek]

• How often do you use these graphs?

Occasionally.

• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?

In mine and others.

• What data are you looking to get from it?

In mine repos: to remind of the role of a contributor.

In other repos: to find out who are the main developers; how much others are contributing; deduce stage of the development.

• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?

I do this just to get better understanding of activity.

• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

Date range might be helpful sometimes and just saw that you can do it. A corresponding note above the graph could be helpful. Removing the range to get "all time" could be nice too.

Also sometimes list of contributors in the graphs doesn't match list in code browser (example), which looks like a bug.

• Anything else you think we should know?

Seems fine otherwise, please don't ruin it by redoing from scratch.

[davidrans]

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

I'd like to be able to look at the entire org, not just one repo

[BeMoreResilient]

Oh Lord, So I am just now beginning to learn Code. I think what you guys do on here is awesome. I am also new to GitHub so if there is a better place to request than I apologize. There are a number of items I would like to fund a team to solve for Cockatrice. Some easy ones such as changing the card database to pull the latest version of a card to adding in a voice chat function. My email is Mr.Tibbetts69@gmail.com. Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested or point me towards those who might be. Thanks.

[seeekr]

How often do you use these graphs? -- multiple times a week
Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories? -- others
What data are you looking to get from it? -- health, activity, reliance on single contributors vs a broader team, who's actually doing the work
What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page? -- decide whether or not to use or recommend the project as a dependency
What could we do to make this data easier or better for you? -- excluding commits by bots by default would be nice (but with a toggle); I'm sure there are ways to improve, but it would take some thinking to be able to specify them
Anything else you think we should know? -- /

[holocronweaver]

This was almost exactly my feedback, but wanted to elaborate.

I mostly use Insights to determine health of a candidate dependency before I adopt it. Top data points are:

• contributors - how many people are regularly contributing, during what times and how often; mostly to avoid projects hinging on one or two individuals
• pulse - for getting a quick rundown on what is being worked on, quality of issue & pull request activity
• dependencies - when this works it can be very useful to see what transitive dependencies will be pulled in, very useful for risk assessment (security, performance, likelihood of critical dependency being abandoned, etc.)

It would be great if there was a Insights 'Risks' section which automated some of this analysis, highlighting if dependencies are out of date or have known vulnerabilities or are otherwise risky, issues / pull requests are being ignored, only one or two people contribute and/or have write access, risky transitive dependencies, project appears abandoned or in maintenance-only mode, little or no documentation, little or no community standards, etc. It could also act as a TODO list for repo maintainers to bring their packages up to production-worthy standards.

[ambergristle]

• How often do you use these graphs? - monthly
• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories? - own
• What data are you looking to get from it? - visualize intra-team output metrics
• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page? - none
• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you? - select focus branch; main may not be the primary target branch during any given production cycle
• Anything else you think we should know? - no

[castarco]

About the requested feedback:

• How often do you use these graphs?
  • Weekly
• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?
  • Both
• What data are you looking to get from it?
  • Contributors diversity
  • how much I contributed in relative terms
• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?
  • It depends on each case
• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?
  • Provide "relative numbers" as well
• Anything else you think we should know?
  • Minor issue, but quite annoying: Sometimes contributors are not listed. As an example: I contributed a PR to Rome Tools ( https://github.com/rome/tools ) that got merged, but somehow I don't appear in the contributors list. This is not the first time I see this problem, but I didn't bother to take not at the time.

[NicolasMassart]

• How often do you use these graphs? - weekly
• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories? - others
• What data are you looking to get from it? - mostly to check if projects are active and how many contributors are committing to it
• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page? - use a project or not, help by contributing, fond the right person to contact
• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you? - Provide easy way to contact the main contributors (most recent, most active) - Show the parts of the projects contributors worked on with colours.
• Anything else you think we should know? - no

[cyao2q]

首页的贡献者显示错误 不刷新啊，缓存了多久 点进去没这个人 首页有这个人

[magicus]

I use this both for my "own" repositories, and others. In the first case, I want to see how I compare to other contributors. It mainly works well for this case, but I think it focuses a bit too much on "commit count" and not "line count", since a few huge commits look like nothing, but a ton of one-line fixes shoots in the sky. Maybe have a toggle for plotting commit count vs line count?

In the second case, I am trying to figure out who is the "active" or "driving" developer. That is a vague term, and it usually involves reviewing a lot of PRs, and contributing code, often, regularly and recently. The contributors page is a bit less helpful in this. For this, I would like to see some kind over overall gauge of developer engagement with the repo, i.e. including PRs opened/closed/reviewed/commented, bugs opened/closed/commented, and also as per above, not only the commit count but also the accumulated line count.

And it would be nice if it was easy to visualize all this both on an "accumulated" aspect, everything that has happened since the repo started, to some kind of "latest", to see if someone used to do a lot but has now dropped out of the project. Kind of a "Fallen Heroes" ranking...

[durack1]

• How often do you use these graphs? - weekly
• Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories? - all and every repo
• What data are you looking to get from it? - to evaluate contributions and identify participation, through PRs, and ALSO through issue discussions etc
• What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page? - identify contributions across communities and organizations, and "quantify" these through README.md badges. e.g.
  [![Contributors](https://contrib.rocks/image?repo=WCRP-CMIP/CMIP6_CVs)](https://github.com/WCRP-CMIP/CMIP6_CVs/graphs/contributors)
• What could we do to make this data easier or better for you? - Augmenting these graphs to allow participants (issue commenters etc) in addition to contributors (PRs/committers) to be identified. We are using multiple repos as a way of centralizing information, with issues opened and templates filled out, which are then validated and committed by repo admins. We'd like to be able to identify the participants just like we're able to do for contributors
• Anything else you think we should know? - no

The info above duplicates another open discussion - #46661

[atifnimran]

Yes I don't know

[joelostblom]

How often do you use these graphs?

• Project-depending, usually weekly

Do you explore these graphs in your own repositories, or for other repositories?

• Any repository with multiple contributors that I am part of, or repositories made by groups of our students where we want to a quick indication if someone is not contributing.

What data are you looking to get from it?

How much and in which ways different individuals are contributing to a repo.

What actions do you expect to take using the data from this page?

For student repos, we can initiate discussions based on indicators from the contributions page. In general, study team dynamics and see if there are inbalances in the efforts of contributors where discussions can be helpful.

What could we do to make this data easier or better for you?

• Expand the definition of contributions to also include issues/PRs opened/closed/comment upon to give a more detailed view of different contributors role in the project.
• It would also be really helpful to retrieve commits from all branches rather than just the main branch since differing merge strategies over time might change the actual commits in master from similar contributions (e.g. switching from merging to squash and merge).
• Make it easy to filter certain files or files endings from counting the commits and lines of code, e.g. uploading a data file of thousands of rows is not the same as manually changing thousands of rows of code
• An option to pooling multiple repos, e.g. under the same organization

[jlord]

👋 Thanks everyone! This was really useful feedback that's really going to help our planning ✨

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