GitHub answered https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159123#discuss...

If a company the size of MS isn't able handle the DOS caused by the LLM slurpers, then it really is game over for the open internet. We are going to need government approved ID based logins to even read the adverts at this rate.

But this feels like a further attempt to create a walled garden around 'our' source code. I say our, but the first push to KYC, asking for phone numbers, was enough for me to delete all and close my account. Being on the outside, it feels like those walls get taller every month. I often see an interesting project mentioned on HN and clone the repo, but more and more times that is failing. Trying to browse online is now limited, and they recently disabled search without an account.

For such a critical piece of worldwide technology infrastructure, maybe it would be better run by a not-for-profit independent foundation. I guess, since it is just git, anyone could start this, and migration would be easy.

you mean https://savannah.gnu.org?

Or maybe https://codeberg.org/.

I don’t think the publication date (May 8, as I type this) on the GitHub blog article is the same date this change became effective.

From a long-term, clean network I have been consistently seeing these “whoa there!” secondary rate limit errors for over a month when browsing more than 2-3 files in a repo.

My experience has been that once they’ve throttled your IP under this policy, you cannot even reach a login page to authenticate. The docs direct you to file a ticket (if you’re a paying customer, which I am) if you consistently get that error.

I was never able to file a ticket when this happened because their rate limiter also applies to one of the required backend services that the ticketing system calls from the browser. Clearly they don’t test that experience end to end.

60 req/hour for unauthenticated users

5000 req/hour for authenticated - personal

15000 req/hour for authenticated - enterprise org

According to https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limi...

I bump into this just browsing a repo's code (unauth).. seems like it's one of the side effects of the AI rush.

Why would the changelog update not include this? it's the most salient piece of information.

I thought I was just misreading it and failing to see where they stated what the new rate limits were, since that's what anyone would care about when reading it.

because it will go way lower soon. and because they don't have to.

they already have all your code. they've won.

I've hit this over the past week browsing the web UI. For some reason, github sessions are set really short and you don't realise you're not logged in until you get the error message.

I really wish github would stop logging me out.

Something strange is going on. I think GH has kept me logged in for months at a time. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to authenticate.

Hmmmm, Github keeps me logged in for months I feel like. Unless I'm misunderstanding the github security logs, my current login is since march.

GH is Microsoft's most successful social network.

GH now uses the publisher business model, and as such, they lose money when you're logged out. same reason why google, fb, etc will not ask you for a password for decades.

Yes, it's not the rate limits that are the problem per se but GitHub's tendency to log you out and make you go through 2fa.

If they would let me stay logged in for a year then I wouldn't care so much.

1 request a minute?!? wow that's just absurd you get it for just looking through code.

agreed. when i first read the title i thought "oh what did the they up the rates to" - then i realized its more of a "downgraded rate limits"

thanks github for the worse experience

1/min? That’s insanely low.

60/hr is not the same as 1/min, unless you're trying to continually make as many requests as possible, like a crawler. and if that is for your use case, then your traffic is probably exactly what they're trying to block.

60/h is obviously well within normal human usage of an app and not bot traffic...

A normal rate limit to separate humans and bots would be something like 60 per minute. So it's about an order of magnitude too low.

Use case: crawling possibly related files based on string search hints in a repo you know nothing about...

Something on the order of 6 seconds a page doesn't sound TOO out of human viewing range depending on how quickly things load and how fast rejects are identified.

I could see ~10 pages / min which is 600 pages / hour. I could also see the argument that a human would get tired at that rate and something closer to 200-300 / hr is reasonable.

Several people in the comments seem to be blaming Github for taking this step for no apparent reason.

Those of us who self-host git repos know that this is not true. Over at ardour.org, we've passed the 1M-unique-IP's banned due to AI trawlers sucking our repository 1 commit at a time. It was killing our server before we put fail2ban to work.

I'm not arguing that the specific steps Github have taken are the right ones. They might be, they might not, but they do help to address the problem. Our choice for now has been based on noticing that the trawlers are always fetching commits, so we tweaked things such that the overall http-facing git repo works, but you cannot access commit-based URLs. If you want that, you need to use our github mirror :)

That is also a problem on a side project I've been running for several years. It is based on a heavily rate-limited third-party API. And the main problem is that bots often cause (huge) traffic spikes which essentially DDoSes the application. Luckily, a large part of these bots can easily be detected based on their behaviour in my specific case. I started serving them trash data and have not been DDoSed since.

Only they haven't started doing this right now. For many years, GitHub has been crippling unauthenticated browsing, doing it gradually to gauge the response. When unauthenticated, code search doesn't work at all and issue search stops working after like, 5 clicks at best.

This is egregious behavior because Microsoft hasn't been upfront about this while they were doing this. Many open source projects are probably unaware that their issue tracker has been walled off, creating headaches unbeknownst to them.

Just sign in, problem solved. It baffles me that a site can provide a useful service that costs money to run, and all you need to do to use it is create a free account -- and people still find that egregious.

That's not how consent works. GitHub captured the open source ecosystem under the premise that its code and issue tracker will remain open to all. Silently changing the deal afterwards is reprehensible.

Who could have known that Microsoft would pull some shenanigans?

Is 20 years too long ago to learn from then?

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. This has never gone away.

> Several people in the comments seem to be blaming Github for taking this step for no apparent reason.

I mean...

* Github is owned by Microsoft.

* The reason for this are AI crawlers.

* The reason AI crawlers exist in masses is an absurd hype around LLM+AI technology.

* The reason for that is... ChatGPT?

* The main investor of ChatGPT happens to be...?

Have you noticed significant slowdown and CPU usage from failban with that many banned IPs? I saw it becoming a huge resource hog with far less IPs than that.

you mean AI crawlers from Microsoft, owners of Github?

The big companies tend to respect robots.txt. The problem is other, unscrupulous actors use fake user agents and residential IPs and don't respect robots.txt or act reasonably.

Big companies have thrown robots.txt to the wind when it comes to their precious AI models.

Surely most AI trawlers have special support for git and just clone the repo once?

The AI companies could do work or they could not do work.

They've pretty widely chosen to not do work and just slam websites from proxy IPs instead.

You would think their products would be used by them to do the work if they worked as well as advertised...

I think you vastly overestimate the average dev and their care for handling special cases that are mostly other people’s aggregate problem.

Can’t they use the AIs to do it?

Apparently, the vibe coding session didn't account for it. /s

I would more readily assume a large social networking company filled with bright minds would have worked out some kind of agreement on, say, a large corpus of copyrighted training data before using it.

It's the wild wild west right now. Data is king for AI training.

Are the scraper sites using a large number of IP addresses, like a distributed denial of service attack? If not, rather than explicit blocking, consider using fair queuing. Do all the requests from IP addresses that have zero requests pending. Then those from IP addresses with one request pending, and so forth. Each IP address contends with itself, so making massive numbers of requests from one address won't cause a problem.

I put this on a web site once, and didn't notice for a month that someone was making queries at a frantic rate. It had zero impact on other traffic.

Exactly that. It's an arms race between companies that offer a large number of residential IPs as proxies and companies that run unauthenticated web services trying not to die from denial of service.

https://brightdata.com/

Huh, that sounds very reasonable, and it's the first time I've heard it mentioned. Why isn't this more wide-spread?

Yes, LLM-era scrapers are frequently making use of large numbers of IP addresses from all over the place. Some of them seem to be bot nets, but based on IP subnet ownership it seems also pretty frequently to be cloud companies, many of them outside the US. In addition to fanning out to different IPs, many of the scrapers appear to use User Agent strings that are randomised, or perhaps in some cases themselves generated by the slop factory. It's pretty fucking bleak out there, to be honest.

Does it seem to anyone like eventually the entire internet will be login only?

At this point knowledge seems to be gathered and replicated to great effect and sites that either want to monetize their content OR prevent bot traffic wasting resources seem to have one easy option.

Static, Near Static (not generated on demand at least; generated only on real content update), and Login seems likely.

AI not caching things is a real issue. Sites being difficult TO cache / failing the 'wget mirror test' is the other side of the issue.

What about AI not respecting robots.txt? I myself have never ran into this, but I've seen complaints of many people who did.

"What about AI not respecting robots.txt?"

since when actor that want gather your entire data respect things like this??? how can you enforce such things with just "please don't crawl this directory thanks"

> how can you enforce such things

A van, some balaclavas and 4 people with big sticks.

> These changes will apply to operations like cloning repositories over HTTPS, anonymously interacting with our REST APIs, and downloading files from raw.githubusercontent.com.

Or randomly when clicking through a repository file tree. The first time I hit a rate limit was when I was skimming through a repository on my phone, and about the 5th file I clicked I was denied and locked out. Not for a few seconds either, it lasted long enough that I gave up on waiting then refreshing every ~10 seconds.

This can affect hosting databases in GitHub repositories.

Yes, it does not look like an intended service usage, but I used it for a demo: https://github.com/ClickHouse/web-tables-demo/

Anyway, will try to do the same with GitHub pages :)

What does “secondary” stand for here in the error message?

> You have exceeded a secondary rate limit.

Edit and self-answer:

> In addition to primary rate limits, GitHub enforces secondary rate limits

(…)

> These secondary rate limits are subject to change without notice. You may also encounter a secondary rate limit for undisclosed reasons.

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limi...

The blog post is tagged with "improvement" - ironic for more restrictive rate limits.

Also, neither the new nor the old rate limits are mentioned.

The truth is this won't actually stop AI crawlers and they'll just move to a large residential proxy pool to work around it. Not sure what the solution is honestly.

At GitHub scale, crawlers will run out of IP addresses regardless if they are use residential addresses.

Criminal charges under CFAA to actual CEOs of actual companies doing this, with long jail terms.

Criminally charging Russian and Chinese does not work. The solution would be to drop these contries off the internet if we want to play hard.

The US cannot even stop NSO to hack the system with spyware and Israel is a political ally.

I don't know if I ever recall seeing a CEO go to jail for practically anything, ever. I'm sure there are lots of examples, but at this point in my life I have kind of derived a rule of thumb of "if you want to commit a crime, just disguise it as a legitimate business" based off seeing so many times where CEOs get off scott free .

FWIW, Joseph Nacchio (the CEO of Qwest Communications) went to jail for like a decade for refusing to help the NSA violate FISA circa 2001.

He went to jail because he refused to help the NSA violate FISA, and then he sold the stock knowing that his refusal would cause the stock to drop (i.e. insider trading). His conviction was entirely on the basis of insider trading. The SEC went after him, not the NSA or DOJ or whatever.

> His conviction was entirely on the basis of insider trading. The SEC went after him, not the NSA or DOJ or whatever.

The SEC has no criminal prosecution powers; all they can do in that regard is write a note asking the DOJ to pretty-please look into something. The only way to get a federal (civilian) criminal conviction is to have the DOJ go after you.

Most of these unauthenticated requests are read-only.

All of public github is only 21TB. Can't they just host that on a dumb cache and let the bots crawl to their heart's content?

I guess you're getting the size from the Arctic Code Vault? https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-archiv... That was 5 years ago and is presumably in git's compressed storage format. Caching the corresponding GitHub HTML would take significantly more.

Wow, I'm realizing this applies to even browsing files in the web UI without being logged in, and the limits are quite low?

This rather significantly changes the place of github hosted code in the ecosystem.

I understand it is probably a response to the ill-behaved decentralized bot-nets doing mass scraping with cloaked user-agents (that everyone assumes is AI-related, but I think it's all just speculation and it's quite mysterious) -- which is affecting most of us.

The mystery bot net(s) are kind of destroying the open web, by the counter-measures being chosen.

I assume they're trying to keep ai bots from strip mining the whole place.

Or maybe your IP/browser is questionable.

What's being strip mined is the openness of the Internet, and AI isn't the one closing up shop. Github was created to collaborate on and share source code. The company in the best position to maximize access to free and open software is now just a dragon guarding other people's coins.

The future is a .txt file of John Carmack pointing out how efficient software used to be, locked behind a repeating WAF captcha, forever.

AI isn't the one closing up shop, it’s the one looting all the stores and taking everything that isn’t bolted down. The AI companies are bad actors that are exploiting the openness of the internet in a fashion that was obviously going to lead to this result - the purpose of these scrapers is to grab everything they can and repackage it into a commercial product which doesn’t return anything to the original source. Of course this was going to break the internet, and people have been warning about that from the first moment these jackasses started - what the hell else was the outcome of all this going to be?

This rings the same tune as the MPAA and RIAA utilizing lawfare to destroy freedom online when pirates were the ones "break[ing] the internet."

Could you help me understand what the difference is between your point and the arguments MPAA and RIAA used to ruin the torrent users' lives they concluded were "thieves"?

As a rule of thumb, do you think people who are happy with the services they contribute content to being open access and wish them to remain so should be the ones who are forced to constantly migrate to new services to keep their content free?

When AI can perfectly replicate the browsing behavior of a human being, should Github restrict viewing a git repository to those who have verified blood biometrics or had their eyes scanned by an Orb? If they make that change, will you still place blame on "jackasses"?

> Could you help me understand what the difference is

Well the main difference is that this is being used to justify blocking and not demanding thousands of dollars.

> When AI can perfectly replicate the browsing behavior of a human being

They're still being jackasses because I'm willing to pay to give free service to X humans but not 20X bots pretending to be humans.

I encountered this on github last week. Very agressive rate limiting. My browser and IP is very ordinary.

Since Microsoft is struggling to make ends meet, maybe they could throw a captcha or proof of work like Anubis by xe iaso.

They already disabled code search for unauthenticated users. Its totally plausible they will disable code browsing as well.

Just sign in if it's an issue for your usage.

My usage isn't high. I was rate limited to like 5 requests per minute. It was a repo with several small files.

And seriously if they keep this up, with limits on their web interface but leave unauthenticated cloning allowed, I'd rather clone the repo than log in.

GitHub code browsing went south since microsoft bought them anyway. Having a simple proxy that clones a repo and serves it would solve problems with rate limits and their awful UX.

That hit me, too. I thought it was an accidental bug and didn’t realize it was actually malice.

> Or maybe your IP/browser is questionable.

I'm using Firefox and Brave on Linux from a residential internet provider in Europe and the 429 error triggers consistantly on both browsers. Not sure I would consider my setup questionable considering their target audience.

I’m browsing from an iPhone in Europe right now and can browse source code just fine without being logged in.

Then it means they're looking at the User-Agent string and determining that an iPhone in Europe most likely has a human using it, and might not require rate-limiting.

*other ai bots, ms will obviously mine anything on there.

Personally, I like sourcehut (sr.ht)

Other bots or MS bots too?

This was announced https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-updated-rate-limits...

(This was originally posted as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43981344 but we're merging the threads)

Doesn‘t make it any better.

Collateral damage of AI I guess

It's even more hilarious because this time it's Microsoft/Github getting hit by it. (It's funny because MS themselves are such a bad actor when it comes to AIAIAI).

This is the same Microsoft that owns LinkedIn which got sued by HiQ which is where the ruling came from that is making sites login required.

Wow! Website terms of use actually meant something in a court of law!

that wasn't what the case was about, so not really.

Did I miss where it says what the new rate limits are? Or are they secret?

Also https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/157887 "Persistent HTTP 429 Rate Limiting on *.githubusercontent.com Triggered by Accept-Language: zh-CN Header" but the comments show examples with no language headers.

I encountered this too once, but thought it was a glitch. Worrying if they can't sort it.

Probably to throttle scraping from AI competitors, and have them pay for the privilege as many other services have been doing

I remember getting this error a few months ago, this does not seem like a temporary glitch. They dont want llm makers to slurp all the data.

Isn't git clone faster than browsing web?

Yep. But AI trawlers don't use it. Ask them why.

Do we know it's AI trawlers?

And not just generally degenerate bots? Or just one evil bot network?

Is there any difference between those 3?

This is going to make the job of package managers a PITA. Especially Nix.

you mean you want to better track users

Good that tools like Homebrew that heavily rely on GitHub usually support environment variables like GITHUB_TOKEN

Once again people post in the "community", but nobody official replies; these discussion-pages are just users shouting into the void.

time to move (alternative github experience) is works, until those crawler goes into alternative then forcing those rate limit as well

Not Mozilla.

See also: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/159123

How would this affect Go dependencies?

Go doesn't pull dependencies directly from GitHub, they are pulled from https://proxy.golang.org/ by default

It sucks that we've collectively surrendered the urls to our content to centralized services that can change their terms at any time without any control. Content can always be moved, but moving the entire audience associated with a url is much harder.

Gitea [1] is honestly awesome and lightweight. I've been running my own for years, and since they've put Actions in a while ago (with GitHub compatibility) it does everything I need it to. It doesn't have all the AI stuff in it (but for some that's a positive :P)

1. https://about.gitea.com/

Gitea’s been great, but I think a lot of its development has moved to Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/

That’s what I run on my personal server now.

I'm stuck on the latest gitea (1.22) that still supports migration to forgejo and unsure where to go next. So I've been following both projects (somewhat lazily), and it seems to me that gitea has the edge on feature development.

Forgejo promised — but is yet to deliver any — interesting features like federation; meanwhile the real features they've been shipping are cosmetic changes like being able to set pronouns in your profile (and then another 10 commits to improve that...)

If you judge by very superficial metrics like commit counts, forgejo's count is heavily inflated by merges (which gitea development process doesn't use, preferring rebase), and frequent dependency upgragdes. When you remove that, the remaining commits represent maybe half of gitea's development activity.

So I expect to observe both for another year before deciding on where to upgragde. They're too similar at the moment.

FWIW, one of gitea larger users — Blender — continues to use and sponsor gitea and has no plans to switch AFAIK.

That's an interesting perspective, and I can't strongly disprove it, but that doesn't match my impression. I cloned both repos (Gitea's from GitHub; Forgejo's from Codeberg, which runs on Forgejo) and ran this command:

  git log --since="1 year ago" --format="%an" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | wc -l

to get an overview of things. That showed 153 people (including a small handful of bots) contributing to Gitea, and 232 people (and a couple bots) contributing to Forgejo. There are some dupes in each list, showing separate accounts for "John Doe" and "johndoe", that kind of thing, but the numbers look small and similar to me so I think they can be safely ignored.

And it looks to me like Forgejo is using a similar process of combining lots of smaller PR commits into a single merge commit. The wide majority of its commits since last June or so seem to be 1-commit-per-PR. Changing the above command to `--since="2024-07-1"` reduces the number of unique contributors to 136 for Gitea, 217 for Forgejo. It also shows 1228 commits for Gitea and 3039 for Forgejo, and I do think that's a legitimately apples-to-apples comparison.

If we brute force it and run

  git log --since="1 year ago" | rg '\(\#\d{4,5}\)' | wc -l

to match lines that mention a PR (like "Simplify review UI (#31062)" or "Remove `title` from email heads (#3810)"), then I'm seeing 1256 PR-like Gitea commits and 2181 Forgejo commits.

And finally, their respective activity pages (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pulse/monthly and https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/activity/monthly) show a similar story.

I'm not an expert in methodology here, but from my initial poking around, it would seem to me that Forgejo has a lot more activity and variety of contributors than Gitea does.

I've successfully migrated from Gitea 1.23 by just rolling back migrations manually in SQL to where forgejo supports it again. Of course, I had backups.

I’ve almost completed the move of my business from GitHub’s corporate offering to self-hosted Forgejo.

Almost went with Gitea, but the ownership structure is murky, feature development seems to have plateaued, and they haven’t even figured out how to host their own code. It’s still all on GitHub.

I’ve been impressed by Forgejo. It’s so much faster than Github to perform operations, I can actually backup my entire corpus of data in a format that’s restorable/usable, and there aren’t useless (AI) upsells cluttering my UX.

I agree with every word of that.

For listeners at home wondering why you'd want that at all:

I want a centralized Git repo where I can sync config files from my various machines. I have a VPS so I just create a .git directory and start using SSH to push/pull against it. Everything works!

But then, my buddy wants to see some of my config files. Hmm. I can create an SSH user for him and then set the permissions on that .git to give him read-only access. Fine. That works.

Until he improves some of them. Hey, can I give him a read-write repo he can push a branch to? Um, sure, give me a bit to think this through...

And one of his coworkers thinks this is fascinating and wants to look, too. Do I create an SSH account for this person I don't know well at all?

At this point, I've done more work than just installing something like Forgejo and letting my friend and his FOAF create accounts on it. There's a nice UI for configuring their permissions. They don't have SSH access directly into my server. It's all the convenience of something like GitHub, except entirely under my control and I don't have to pay for private repos.

The development energy has not really moved, Gitea is moving much faster. Forgejo is stuck two versions behind and with their license change they're struggling to keep up.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/157887 This has been going on for weeks and is clearly not a simple mistake.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43981673 so we could include it in the merged thread)

Triggered by Chinese language on the client side? Interesting.

Just tried it on chrome incognito on iOS and do hit this 429 rate limit :S That sucks, it’s already bad enough when GitHub started enforcing login to even do a simple search.