I'll star a repo when I want to add it to my "favourite" or "interesting" repos - they are all listed under "Your stars". Is there a better way of achieving the same?

I'm using a local gitweb instance for this purpose. I have a directory of favorite repos cloned using "git clone --mirror" and a cron job to sync them every 3 hours. gitweb provides a web interface for browsing them.

I like that it lets me open files without JavaScript enabled and search the code without logging in. I still use GitHub.com to read the issues on a couple repos though.

Example of what gitweb looks like: https://sourceware.org/git/ - There's also cgit which is similar: https://git.kernel.org/

is lack of privacy your issue with the "your stars" page? consider a bookmarks manager.

You can make the profile private and it’ll hide the stars.

Can't hide the stars from Github itself though. Keeping as much preference data away from social networks as possible is not an unreasonable stance, IMHO.

You also can't hide the fact that you're browsed or even cloned the repository from GitHub, since it's on their servers.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Much harder for some website to correlate random dowmloads to a specific identity.

not a bad idea. in that case you can just bookmark them, no?

Why wouldn't you use bookmarks like for everything else?

In general those things seem like site-specific bookmarks. As a general principle I want to just use one bookmark feature for all web things.

That just seems like petty behaviour.

Why?

You can give genuine ones.

not when giving a star is a condition for having a report accepted.

i barely ever star any project. stars are public and so i will only star the most important projects that i want to recommend to others.

but i do occasionally make reports to projects that i don't actively use or don't want to recommend. if a project doesn't want my report without a star, then well, good luck to them.

Yes, but this particular sub-thread started with GP saying:

> I don’t think I have ever starred anything on Github. (...)

i don't get what you are trying to say. i haven't starred anything either, and i'd consider giving a star just to get a report accepted as fake just like GP...

It goes like that:

I thought that the question "Why?" asked about this particular fragment of GP's comment:

> I don’t think I have ever starred anything on Github. (...)

Not to the particular situation of fixes for likes. Therefore the answer:

> because I don't give out fake likes.

was thought to be an answer to question: "Why haven't you ever starred anything on Github?". With this in mind I just wanted to say that likes do not have to be fake. You can like what you like. It may be a bit off the general topic of fixes for likes, but not off the more general topic of Github likes.

In this particular case I don't know what I would do. Probably if I really needed it I would just comply. If I already would have liked it or was close to it I would probably also just do it. In other cases when I would have thought about this as a courtesy I would drop it.

I have a bunch of repositories liked. I use it as a bookmark and a signal of interest for maintainers. As much as one would want to claim Github stars are not meaningless Internet points. A search engine will promote more starred repositories more, more people in general will think about using the thing. It is not a perfect measure of course, but it is not meaningless signal. It may often not mean much, but most of the time it is more meaningful than not. For my particular interests I often seek out repositories that have not the most stars, but also not the least.

I think the problem here is that Im not the person who started the thread. But I do indeed use them as a bookmark system and unlike many people I do eventually instsr a repo. The few I keep starred despite that are genuinely my favorites, most by default is "watch for later".

Hence my answer, I feel giving a star becsuse I was prompted to in order to do something unrelated is fake.