<story><title>Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market</title><url>https://dagster.io/blog/fake-stars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ziml77</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised that Github stars are valuable enough to buy. Personally I never look at the star count because even if they were legit, they don&amp;#x27;t really tell me anything more useful than I get from looking at other things in the repo.&lt;p&gt;I tend to check the age difference between the earliest and latest commits because that lets me be sure it&amp;#x27;s not a project that someone spent a couple weeks coding up, dropped on github, and then forgot about. I&amp;#x27;ll also check the issues on there. I&amp;#x27;m looking for more closed issues than open ones, but I&amp;#x27;ll also quickly scan over them to get a rough idea of how many are truly meaningful issues. I also get signals from the readme and docs. It&amp;#x27;s not a hard pass if there&amp;#x27;s issues with those, but it&amp;#x27;s certainly helpful to my opinion if they exist and are both clear and detailed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_xivi</author><text>Closed issues dont mean anything though... a lot of maintainers bulk close hundered of issues as &amp;quot;nofix&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;no activity after 3 months&amp;quot;, and so on. Just sweeping them under the rug. And many of them pride themselves with the 0 opened issues like it mean something. Any software in the world can have 0 issues if they played this game.&lt;p&gt;So unless you are really well versed in the project and spent some time following it, stars actually might be a better indicator of the project quality and reputation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market</title><url>https://dagster.io/blog/fake-stars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ziml77</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised that Github stars are valuable enough to buy. Personally I never look at the star count because even if they were legit, they don&amp;#x27;t really tell me anything more useful than I get from looking at other things in the repo.&lt;p&gt;I tend to check the age difference between the earliest and latest commits because that lets me be sure it&amp;#x27;s not a project that someone spent a couple weeks coding up, dropped on github, and then forgot about. I&amp;#x27;ll also check the issues on there. I&amp;#x27;m looking for more closed issues than open ones, but I&amp;#x27;ll also quickly scan over them to get a rough idea of how many are truly meaningful issues. I also get signals from the readme and docs. It&amp;#x27;s not a hard pass if there&amp;#x27;s issues with those, but it&amp;#x27;s certainly helpful to my opinion if they exist and are both clear and detailed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Takennickname</author><text>You are likely not important enough to scam. The first people I can imagine this being shown to are VCs in pitch decks who are only going to see this on a powerpoint and not actually on github. Very unlikely the VC will check github itself to verify the number, and if they do, even less likely they&amp;#x27;ll verify that the stars are real.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re the kind that checks everything. Even if you had something valuable, a scammer wouldn&amp;#x27;t waste their time with you then there are easier fish to bait.</text></comment>