From 2,500 requests to 24: Rebuilding star history without the stargazers

GitHub restricted access to stargazer and watcher lists after public identities were abused for spam and phishing and the underlying queries became costly for highly starred repositories, but the change disrupted tools that used stargazer timestamps to chart project popularity. In response to maintainer and tool-builder feedback, GitHub introduced a repository star-history endpoint that returns daily aggregate star counts for up to 30 weeks per request without exposing user identities. The previous stargazer API required paginating through every current star, with repositories such as react/react needing thousands of requests, while a pagination bug caused each page request to count the repository’s full star set and contributed to slow queries and timeouts. GitHub rejected designs that merely removed identities or aggregated results after scanning all stars, instead filtering records by indexed time ranges before grouping them into daily counts. This reduces full-history retrieval for large repositories from thousands of requests to a few dozen and substantially lowers database processing, though unusually high-star weeks, removed stars, and calendar boundaries remain limitations.

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